Glossary of Search Terms - ABC-CLIO Corporate

Glossary of Search Terms

A focus group of users indicated that a glossary would be useful for this website. Here are gathered search terms from the textbook, plus any additional terms I run across and think are worth sharing.

A & I services Abstracting & Indexing services: finding aids for published literature, mainly articles. This terminology was more common when such things were printed, hardcopy artifacts. Now we tend to just call them article databases, and more and more often they provide full text (or at least ways to get to it), rather than just a list of citations arranged by subject or author (an index), or such a thing with abstracts.

Ajax window Like a popup window, but it doesn't upset your browser. Produces a screen on screen effect, allowing you to do something (in EBSCO databases, adjust your search limits or other parameters; in American Factfinder, add a geography, for example) without having to leave the screen you're on. Saves backing-andforthing.

Boolean logic Basic Tool No. 1. Logic terms used to combine search terms: AND, OR, NOT. The effect of AND and OR is the opposite of ordinary English language usage: AND will almost always reduce the number of search results, while OR will always give you more. NOT reduces your results, but should be used sparingly, as records that get NOT'ed out may also contain desirable material. See pp. 27?33 of the Librarian's Guide 4th Edition for a full discussion of this topic.

Coffee All purpose research tool.

Controlled vocabulary Basic Tool No. 2; also known as subject headings, descriptors, thesaurus terms, or authority control. These are terms applied by humans to records in subscription databases (part of what you are paying for) that capture the essence of what the item is about ("item" because this applies not just to article records, but records for any kind of document or image). Controlled vocabulary provides "added entry points" (ways, words) for finding records, and has the advantage of being consistent rather than random: thus "controlled." It means the list of terms has been thought about ahead of time and documented: thou shalt choose terms from this list, kind of thing. So instead of kids, always use children. Instead of young adults, use teenagers. Continuing the theme from the textbook, ideally, every record in a database that has to do with loons would be given the subject heading "loons"--not waterbird on some records, loons on others, and Gavia immer on others. See pp. 33?34 of the Librarian's Guide 4th Edition for a full discussion of this topic.

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Student Resources for Suzanne S. Bell, Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, Fourth Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. 2015.

Data Data refers to individual numbers, for example, the original computer file of all the numerically coded responses to a survey, which usually looks like just a series of numbers. This is a data file, usually called a data set. Data are actual values. One value in a data set is a data point. If a person really does want a series of values to analyze (using a program such as SPSS, SAS, Stata, or R), then he or she really does want a data set. [Sidebar, p. 184, Librarian's Guide 4th] Cf. statistics.

Descriptors. See Controlled vocabulary

False drop A false drop is a document that is retrieved by your search terms, but the terms in the document are not used in the sense you intended. For example, a search for pies AND delivery services that retrieves a record with the title: Pie in the Sky, that does also include the words delivery services--but is definitely NOT about delivery of pies to customers' homes. Controlled vocabulary and field searching can help avoid the falsedrop problem, although even those tools may not make it go away completely. Systems that search large quantities of full text are especially prone to the false-drop problem.

Field index A field index is a list of all the values (generally, words) from a particular field in a database, with some kind of identifier indicating from which record each value came. This is much like the way the index at the end of a book indicates on which pages a word appears. Such field indexes become part of the database but have a separate existence from the records. A field index list can be alphabetized and optimized in various ways to make searching the database faster. See pp. 12?18 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion of this topic, with visual examples.

Index The plain term "index" in the context of information retrieval refers to a finding tool for published literature (see "A&I services" above). Before computers, there were printed indexes: lists of articles from a specific set of publications most commonly arranged by subject and/or author. With the advent of computerization, such finding tools are more often referred to as databases, but the "index" terminology often lives on in the name of the database: the Science Citation Index, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, Index to Legal Periodicals, Philosopher's Index, etc. So this is an index in the big, database sense. There are also, of course, indexes at the end of books, and field indexes, which are quite different (see above).

MeSH MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings; this is the set of thesaurus terms (controlled vocabulary) created and used by the National Library of Medicine to index the records in Medline (and thus PubMed).

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Student Resources for Suzanne S. Bell, Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, Fourth Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. 2015.

OCLC

Online Computer Library Center; creator of WorldCat (and much more).

Pearl growing

Basic Tool No. 7. Pearl growing is an iterative search strategy in which you start with a simple search (not using any advanced tools, fields, etc.) and then examining the results ("learning from your results") to find appropriate subject headings or to discover more or alternate terms to search on from the most on-target hits. You then add one or more of these terms to your search strategy, or replace your previous terms with the new ones, to produce a more precise list of results. See pp. 58?59 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion and example of using this strategy.

Precision

Precision refers to focusing your search down, retrieving fewer, but more perfectly on-target and relevant results. High precision means that you are unlikely to retrieve very many, if any, irrelevant results (no false drops) . . . but you might miss a good result, too. Getting the right balance between precision and recall is tricky (and often depends on the situation: an undergrad wanting "a few good articles" will be quite happy with a high precision search that perhaps misses some relevant material). See pp. 36?37 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion. Cf. Recall.

Proximity operators

Basic Tool No. 4. The use of special commands called proximity operators allows you to specify that termA appear within so many words of termB in order for a record to be retrieved. Proximity searching is most important when you are searching full-text material, because use of the Boolean AND in that situation is very likely to produce a lot of false drops, e.g., garbage: term1 at the beginning of the document and term2 at the end, having nothing to do with each other. Unlike the universal Boolean AND, OR, and NOT, however, proximity operators vary from system to system; you are advised to check the Help files for whatever database you are in to get the syntax exactly right (some use NEAR#, some use N#, N/#, P#, P/# - as you see, it can vary a lot and the differences are subtle). See pp. 50?53 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion of this topic.

Recall

Recall refers to retrieving more results: spreading your net as wide as possible, and probably picking up a number of less relevant results along with the good results. High recall means that you are unlikely to miss any relevant items, but you'll need to slog through more results and apply more judgment. For a doctoral student checking to be sure no one has addressed his/her idea before, you'd want to aim for a search with high recall. See pp. 36?37 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion. Cf. Precision.

Statistics

When you process data, grouping like data points and expressing them as percentages, then you have statistics, which are groups of numbers, usually expressed in terms of percentages. The data (number) and

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Student Resources for Suzanne S. Bell, Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, Fourth Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. 2015.

the statistical percentage it represents both appear in the following sentence: Almost 9 million (data) young Americans, or about 15 percent (a statistic) of all children, are overweight. Non-numerically oriented people will often use the word data when they really want statistics (which is good, because statistics are usually easier to find). [Sidebar, p. 184, Librarian's Guide 4th] Cf. data.

Stop words

Stop words, a.k.a. noise words, are those little words that most systems (commercial database or Web search) do not index. Typical choices for a stop word list could include: an, by, for, from, of, the, to, with, be, where, how, it, he, my, his, when, there, is, are, so, she, and her. There is no standard list of stop words that all databases adhere to, which is good in a way, because it allows for the possibility of a database having a relatively short list of stop words, or possibly even none at all. This means, however (if you determine that stop words might be interfering with your search results), that you'll have to dig around in the database's help files and hope that the list of stop words is documented somewhere.

Subject headings. See Controlled vocabulary

Thesaurus

Although I group the term thesaurus with controlled vocabulary (which it definitely is), I am giving it its own entry in this list, because a thesaurus is a very special kind of controlled vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as: A classified list of terms, esp. keywords, in a particular field, for use in indexing and information retrieval. A thesaurus is special because it represents the subject headings of a particular discipline (such as education, psychology, or library science), and because it presents the terms in a hierarchical structure (that's the "classified list" part of the OED definition). The hierarchy consists of a subject term, and all the terms deemed to be Broader, Narrower, or Related to that term. Looking up one entry provides not just one term, but many: a whole picture of that topic within the discipline. Thus in the PsycINFO thesaurus, looking up Sleep deprivation reveals that Deprivation is a Broader Term, and Sleep, Sleep Disorders, and Sleepiness are Related Terms. Looking up Teaching Methods shows that Teaching is a Broader Term, there are 20 Narrower Terms (including Discovery Teaching Method and Problem Based Learning), and 12 Related Terms (ending with Zone of Proximal Development. Wow.). Making all the decisions about term relationships is a huge task, carried out by large organizations of people. Subject specific databases that have well-developed thesauri include ERIC (the education database), Library Literature, and PsycINFO. You can learn a lot about a field simply by browsing around in its thesaurus.

Truncation

Basic Tool No. 5. Truncation is an efficient way of extending your search to pick up many variations on a word without having to (1) think of all the possible variants or (2) input them with endless ORs. Truncation allows you to search on a word stem and retrieve any word beginning with those letters, for example: harmon*. Truncation characters vary from system to system; the most common is the asterisk (*), but ! and ? are also used in some systems. See pp. 53?56 of the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion of this topic and a table of Truncation and wildcard symbols used by various vendors.

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Student Resources for Suzanne S. Bell, Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, Fourth Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. 2015.

Wildcard

Part of Basic Tool No. 5, Truncation, but where truncation symbols represent any number of characters, wildcards are used to substitute for characters on a one-to-one basis. Be prepared for confusion: the symbols used for wildcards are the same as those used for truncation, but the effect changes, depending on the vendor. That is, one vendor may use ! for truncation and * for a wildcard, while another exactly reverses those two meanings. A search situation in which the zero-to-one character wildcard symbol can be very helpful is for picking up US/UK alternative spellings, such as:

labo$r globali#ation

to get either labor or labour to get either globalisation or globalization

See pp. 55?56 in the Librarian's Guide 4th for a full discussion of this topic.

?2015 ABC-CLIO, LLC

Student Resources for Suzanne S. Bell, Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, Fourth Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. 2015.

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