Today in our series on search tips, we'll discuss ways to create more complex searches.
Srsly, have you looked at this thing? Search by subject, title, and more. Narrow by academic discipline or content type (meaning article vs. ebook vs, book chapter, etc.). There are other options, too. Check it out.
We ran this search using the advanced page, and we got over 40 million results.
While organizational leadership is our subject, we specifically wanted to learn about healthcare organizations. And we didn't see anything in those results about them. However, when we limited our search to the discipline of medicine, our results dropped to 1 million items. Limiting it to full-text online scholarly journal articles with a few more clicks, and we were down to about 770 thousand.
Let's get fancy!
Using parentheses in searches works a little like it does in algebra or logic, which is useful when you are trying to combine the techniques to build more complicated searches. Typing (business OR organiz*) (manage* OR leader*) increased our earlier search from 4 million to 8 million journal articles. I did my search that way because there are many different ways to express the concept of organizational leadership, and this search returned us phrases like "leaders and their organizations", "Organizational Change Management", and "the relationship between leadership behaviors and knowledge management."
Yes, in this example it would take a lifetime for us to read all the articles, and maybe I only need to write a 5-page paper. However, if our search only returns five results, and we use them without looking further, we'll miss out on important perspectives. One solid rule that you'll hear good researchers state a million different ways is "start out with a very broad search and narrow slowly based on the results you receive." In a practical sense, being thorough will get you better grades, and in the world outside 5-page papers and exams with essay questions, incomplete information can be far more dangerous than no information at all.
Also, sometimes we need to take a look around to find a topic for a paper. Broad searches can help with that as well.
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