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Research ›› Democracy Research Guide
Research StrategyTo make the search process easier, it is important to first think about what question your research should answer. The process of moving from having a question to having a question answered can be straightforward or circuitous - it really depends on the talents of the person doing the research. One of the best practices researchers employ that everyone can adapt to suit their own needs is to plan a search strategy before embarking on the hunt. Of course, all searchers think about what information they need and where to find it, but structuring that thinking could be beneficial. A suggested general sequence is:
When the time comes to actually find the Web sites, books, etc. consider: Libraries One of the major tools for determining what resources a library has to offer is its catalog. Many catalogs are available online and can be searched in a variety of ways. Users could apply some of the search language strategies presented below when conducting catalog searches. Internet Please Note: the term system is used here to represent Internet search engines and library online catalogs interchangeably. When using an Internet search engine or a library's catalog and the time comes to ask a system to accept a search, the potential for successful results depends heavily on how the machine reads the question. Many systems will accept "natural language" searching in which a user can select everyday words to express their question (ex: "jogging and knee pain"). The alternative is "controlled vocabulary" which is a set of predefined terms that a user must apply in order for the system to recognize their search (ex: "running injuries"). The clearest benefit of natural language searching is that users do not have to learn what words to use to best describe a topic. A downside is that such freedom during searching can lead to results that have nothing to do with the subject. If someone wants to search for 'bridge', natural language will not help the system understand that 'bridge' in this context means the structures that span a gap. It may return resources about a dental bridge, or an emotional bridge built between people. Using a controlled vocabulary can help resolve the problem of context because words are given a precise meaning by the system's designers. Therefore, if someone is searching for information on a dental bridge, they would have to use "dental bridges", "dental bridgework", or whatever term the system prescribes. For example, for the Democracy Research Guide we've designed a set of subject headings to describe an Organizations' focus of work. Once the words are selected, it is time to decide how to put them together for the system to do its work. Search terms can be connected in different ways to tell the machine to look for different things. Familiar to many researchers who work in online environments is the concept of boolean operators. Boolean searching describes the method of telling a machine to find certain words, sometimes in a certain order.
Another way to help the system understand a search is to group words into phrases. Depending on the search system, it may accept parentheses ( ) or quotation marks " " around words to tell it how to treat those words. An example is "International Date Line". If the machine reads those words separately, it would retrieve every item with the word "international", "date", or "line" - potentially hundreds of thousands of documents. But if it reads the words as a phrase, it will look for those words to appear in that specified order and retrieve only items with the words "International Date Line" together. There are several sites dedicated to helping Internet users to learn search techniques that improve the quality and relevance of search results. Hint: an Internet search using Google and the phrase "search strategies" will return some good sites. For example:
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