CRJU 4601: Gangs

While there is not one right way to do a search, the strategies identified here will improve your results.​Developing an effective search strategy involves:

• Identifying the key search concepts 
• Identifying related terms to your key search concepts
• Using standard search structures to broaden and narrow your search results

Never use sentence structure, such as your research question or thesis statement.

A keyword is a word used to search library catalogs (GIL-Find, GIL-Find Universal), article databases (GALILEO), and web search engines (Google Scholar) in order to locate results that match that word in a specified part or in any part of the item, such as the title or in the full text. 
Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and subject headings to help you formulate keywords. 

Quotation marks can be used to identify phrases.

By using quotations marks, you are telling the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.

“Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design”
Instead of
Crime AND Prevention AND Environmental AND Design

“Routine Activity Theory”
Instead of
Routine AND Activity AND Theory

Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms from your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses 3 terms (AND, OR, and NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms.

Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternate endings.The character (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.

Note: A few databases will use a different character. (e.g. Lexis Nexis !)

Crimin* retrieves

Criminal

Criminals

Criminological

Criminology