1 - University of Michigan



Search Tools Lesson Plan

Instructions in bold face are actions that the instructor should take during the class.

Instructions in italics are notes to the instructor.

Please note that in our practice sessions, the students told us repeatedly that they enjoyed learning about the MySearchTools section and that they would not have used this tool on their own so it’s strongly recommended that you include at least a mention of this function.

Please feel free to use whatever sections of this lesson plan you feel would be most appropriate for the group you are teaching.

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Preparations before the class

If, in Section VI, part C, you plan to run a search on Down Syndrome in Genetics Abstracts, then choose an entry ahead of time, that will easily pull up the full text of an article through MGetIt.

In preparation for Section IX, run a Quick Search of athletes and body image in the General Interest databases. Either find the entry that begins “Disordered eating attitudes and…” or find another entry from a scholarly journal that is easily available full text through MGetIt but is not available full text in Search Tools. If you choose another entry, then amend the script accordingly based on how much information appears initially in Search Tools.

In Section IX, part F, check the Summary of your search to make sure the results still give approximately the same numbers.

In Section IX, parts H and I, if you want to emphasize a subset other than the Social Sciences, prepare an appropriate example ahead of time.

Have the citation you’re using in Find EJournals written out on the board beforehand.

Lawrence, A. (2006) “Legacy of a Longhorns Legend.” Sports Illustrated, January 7th, 2006, p. 79.

OR

Taylor, P. (2005) “Big Ten Takes a Hit.” Sports Illustrated, September 19, 2005, p. 112.

Have the PowerPoint presentation open in one window but not the one that students will see..

Have Search Tools window open to begin with, so that students do not think the PPT slide is what ST looks like.

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I. Introduction: What is SearchTools?

• Gateway to the library’s electronic resources.

• Visual map of the different things that Search Tools allows you to do.

[Now open up PPT slide]

• Variety of tools that allow you to perform different functions that may not be directly related to each other, but are all related to finding electronic resources.

• The different functions are the Quick/Power Search, Find e-Journals, and Find Databases.

A. Find e-Journals

• Millions of journal articles available through Search Tools.

[Switch to PPT slide and click to show Find e-Journals.]

• Find e-Journals function allows you to search for and look through the journals we have online

• So if you are looking for an article that you know already appeared in the journal called “Science”, the E-Journals list will allow you to look for the journal Science by title, and then you can search within in it for the particular article.

B. Find Databases

[click to show Find Databases on PPT]

• What if you don’t know the name of a particular journal to search? Databases will allow you to search across many journals all at once.

[click to show how Find Databases works on PPT]

• Which journals depend on which database you use. For example, the “Social Sciences Abstracts” database will search for articles inside thousands of different social science journals.

C. Quick Search

[click to show Quick Search in PPT]

• What if you don’t know a particular journal and can’t decide on just one database? Search Tool’s “Quick Search” is one more level up in searching.

• We have access to hundreds of databases, and “Quick Search” will allow you to search across many databases at a time. This is called “meta-searching” or “cross-searching”. There are drawbacks, too – we’ll explain these when we talk about “Quick Search” specifically.

D. SearchTools is not the library catalog.

[Open up library gateway page: ]

• A catalog is a list of everything that the library owns or has access to described at the level of entire books and entire journals.

[Be sure to point out Mirlyn link on library web page, or even open up Mirlyn briefly to emphasize that it is completely different from Search Tools.]

• The databases that you’ll see in SearchTools are where you will find citations to articles from journals and sometimes chapters from books.

• How do you get to Search Tools? Follow the link from the library web page.

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II. Demonstrate layout of Search Tools interface

• The powerpoint slide was a simplified visualization of Search Tools.

• Five different tabs when you open Search Tools: Quick Search, Power Search, Find Databases, Find E-Journals, and My Search Tools.

• As we move from tab to tab, notice that the page header looks the same, but the bottom part of the screen changes quite a bit at each new tab.

• Instead of following this order of the tabs on the screen, we will look at the simplest tabs first.

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III. Have everyone log in

• If you are going to do any personalized functions in SearchTools you will need to be logged in. Since we’ll be doing some of these later in the class, let’s log in right from the beginning.

• Wait to see if anyone has any problems with logging in.

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IV. Find E-Journals

The Find E-Journals function will take you out of Search Tools to the E-Journals website.

• If you are looking for a particular journal, you know its name and you want to see if the library has electronic access to it, click on the Find eJournals tab.

• You will normally search by journal name.

• Let’s use an actual citation. Let’s say a professor gave you this, and you had to find it:

Choose one of these citations and point to where you’ve written it on the board:

• Lawrence, A. (2006) “Legacy of a Longhorns Legend.” Sports Illustrated, January 7th, 2006, p. 79.

OR

Taylor, P. (2005) “Big Ten Takes a Hit.” Sports Illustrated, September 19, 2005, p. 112.

• Can put in a title or can search alphabetically.

• Let’s try entering Sports Illustrated.

• To go to the actual journal from here, click on one of the links to the electronic version. [Make sure to navigate through to the actual article.]

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V. My SearchTools

• My Search Tools is the part of Search Tools that you will use when you want to save anything to retrieve later in another Search Tools session.

• If I regularly consult a particular journal and, therefore, want to have a quick link to that title, I can save some of these links to specific journals in a more personalized space in SearchTools called MySearchTools.

• This is one example of a personalized function for which you need to be logged in.

• Let's return to our results page for Sports Illustrated – we can “bookmark” it by clicking on the + link.

• Let’s do another one – how about a journal called Journal of personality and social psychology. (Run a search for this title) Clicking on the + link will put a link to this title in MySearchTools.

• Return to Search Tools and click on the MySearchTools tab. Notice that I can save links to databases, journals, specific preferences within SearchTools and so on.

• Click on the My eJournals tab. Notice that both titles appear here.

• I can either click on the link to it or I can use the x button to remove it from my list. I can also use the garbage can icon to remove all the entries I have in this section.

[Allow play time if you have it – Ask students to find E-Journals of their choice and move to My SearchTools]

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VI. Find Databases

• What if you want to search several journals at once? Databases give you a way to do this – they often collect together a bunch of different journals/sources that all focus on the same subject area.

• If I know of a particular database that I want to use, then I can click on Find Databases.

A. Find known item by name

• I want one of the LexisNexis databases since I’ve heard that it covers lots of newspapers. So I’ll put lexisnexis in the searchbox.

• Click on the i button to find out more information about the database. On the second entry I find that this is the database that I want (LexisNexis Academic is the database that contains a large number of newspapers) and I could click on the link to go to the database.

B. Truncation

• What happens if I don’t know for sure how to spell lexisnexis? I’m going to click on Find Databases again and then I’m going to enter part of the name. I’m pretty sure it starts with lex and then I’m going to put a ? after that.

• Explain truncation.

• I’m also going to change from “Contains” which would give me that root word anywhere in the search to “Begins with” so that it’s only looking for databases that start with that root. Run search.

C. Find unknown database (browse by subject)

• Find Databases can also help if you’re not sure what database to use.

• Click on Find Databases and subject tab.

• One of the things to remember in general about SearchTools is that it often takes awhile to load a page or to run a command. So make sure the page is fully loaded before you do anything else.

• Let’s say that I need to write a paper on the genetics behind Down syndrome. Which subject should I choose? Which sub-subject would I choose?

• I would click on the “Science” link and then wait for the subcategories to change. Then I would click on “Genetics”. [Could also do Health Sciences and Genetics]

• Note that the number next to the subcategory refers to the number of databases relevant to this subject area.

[A search in genetics abstracts for down syndrome, should you want to run a search at this point or if you want to stay with this topic, gives a nice results list – choose an item ahead of time that has access to the full text through SFX]

• Let’s say that I need to write a paper on body image and the television media – what might I look for then? [Browse by subject for “social sciences” then “communications”.]

• For communications, you’ll find a ranked list of databases and the name of the librarian to consult.

• So you’ll use Find Databases when you are trying to find a database in a particular subject field or when you know exactly which database you want and you just want to go to that database.

• If Find Databases for a particular category brings up a large number of databases and you’re still puzzled about which of those databases would be the best one to use, you might want to consult with the librarian who is a specialist in that area.

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VII. Create sets in My Search Tools

[LexisNexis cannot be searched in the Search Tools interface. For our Power Search example, you will want to have at least one searchable database saved to your "My Databases." ComAbstracts, ArticleFirst and America History and Life are all okay.]

• Notice that just as with the ejournals, you can click on the plus link to add a particular database to your MySearchTools if this is a database you’ll want to consult regularly. Let’s say from this list of communications databases, I’m going to add ComAbstracts to my list, along with ArticleFirst.

• You can use My Search Tools to create a personalized list of databases – in Search Tools, these are called “folders”.

• Let's switch back over to My Search Tools and then select the "My Databases" tab. The databases that we selected will appear on the Clipboard on the right side of the screen.

• Next, select the "folder" icon on the left side of the screen to create a folder where you can save your databases. A dialog box will appear.

• Enter a name and description for your folder/set, and then click on the "Save" button.

Be sure that the folder/set you have created is displaying in the "Select Set" pull down menu on the left.

• In the Search Tools Clipboard, use the "arrow" icon in the Actions column to copy databases to the new folder/set that you have created.

• Please note that there is a system limitation of 8 databases.

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VIII. Search from library gateway page

• I want to show you a way to use the Find eJournals and Find Databases functions without even going directly into SearchTools.

• Click on the Library Homepage. Point out the search box and type in PsycInfo. Page down to show Databases category of results.

[Allow play time if you have it – ask students to find databases in their fields of interest and add them to personal sets in My Search Tools.]

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IX. Quick Search

**[Once class has gone to this section, ask them to sit back and watch what you are doing. Explain that too many people searching at one time will overwhelm the system. Also – if you have already created personalized sets/folders, your Quick Search will be slightly different from theirs.]**

Let’s assume that your class assignment is to compile a bibliography on a topic. You have to research the topic and list several citations to newspaper or journal articles. You can begin your research in Quick Search.

• A quick search lets you search a select number of databases in a broad field to get a rough idea of what kinds of entries you will find in the database

• Will sometimes help you determine which database you’d like to look at in greater depth

• There are eleven defined Quick Search database sets.

• If you created a database set earlier, then that will appear as a search set option as well.

A. Athletes and body image – quick search

• Let’s say we have a paper on how body image differs in athletes and non-athletes. I’m going to do a search for athletes and body image.

• Best to do very basic simple searches in Quick Search. For instance, in Google and many other databases, you use quotes to make sure that the database reads a phrase as a phrase. You don’t want to do that in Quick Search because you’re searching across a number of databases and some will let you use quotes and some won’t.

• Earlier we used truncation to look for all the variations of a root word. That’s another thing that you don’t want to try to do in Quick Search.

• Also you might have to tinker with even a very basic search like the one I entered if you don’t get good results. For instance, athletes and body and image might give better results or you might need to try just athletes and image.

B. Explain/describe search results – summary by database (might need to click on Summary by Database to continue to show the results from each database if the search results come up too quickly)

• First thing you see is the names of the databases that are being searched

• How many times it found entries in the database that contained your words

• How many it retrieved

• The number retrieved will always max out at 30 because that’s the limit that we’ve set. This way you can get a representative number of entries from each database to look at but not have to wait forever for all the databases to call up all the entries. You’ll see in a minute that there’s a way to call up more than 30 from a particular database if you’re interested in it.

• Looks like General Onefile and Proquest Research Library are the best databases for you to use for your topic because they came up with the most entries

• Doesn’t take into account that those two databases are full text databases while the others aren’t. So that means that those two databases checked not just the title and subject headings for each entry to find the search words. They also checked the entire articles that were available. Those two databases will always come up with more initial results. They will be good databases for your topic but they aren’t necessarily the best databases. I’ll explain more about that in a bit.

C. Explore results list – limit with facets, view sample record, view MGetIt box

[In the interest of saving class time, we have purposely modified this section to only demonstrate looking at one article from the results list, in the interest of time. Problems that may arise, like duplicate items or the lack of electronic access to an article, are covered by the “Troubleshooting” handout.]

• We initially get a large number of results but notice on the left side of the page that there are facets that can help you narrow the scope of your results in various ways. I could click on a year, for instance, and get only the articles that were published in that year. (If you are asked – or wonder yourself how the Topics facets are assigned in Search Tools – according to Ex Libris documentation “Clustering in MetaLib is performed by a text analysis engine, which assigns each record to one or more topics based on the search results sent to the clustering engine.) Notice the pluses next to the Topics facets. You can click on a plus to get an expanded list of subtopics in that category.

• Notice the link on the left above the facets called “All retrieved records”. Let’s click on that to get back to our full list of results. Now notice at the top of the page where it says “retrieve more.” This is how you could see more than the initial 30 entries from every database.

• These results are supposed to be sorted by relevance but that doesn’t mean that the best, most scholarly entries come first. Notice at the top of the results page that I can also sort by title, author, year, and database.

• Can view results in three different formats.

• First format tells you what database the entry is from but doesn’t tell you what source or what journal it’s from.

• If I click on Citation List, then you will see what publication contained the entry.

• If I click on the title of a particular entry, I will see a varying amount of information. Some entries will show an abstract of the article; others may give you the full text of the article right here in Search Tools. I’m going to click on the title of this one, “Athletes’ use of exercise imagery …” because it looks like it addresses my subject and it seems like it might be coming from a scholarly journal.

[Make sure you run your searches ahead of time in order to have examples chosen beforehand, but not too far ahead of time, because results may change.]

• In this instance, we can see that we get the abstract of the article.

[Choose an article that is not full text so that you have a reason to show why someone would need to click on MGetIt.]

• If I don’t get the full text and I want to view the article, then I can click on MGetIt to search for the full text of this item.

• Remember that MGetIt will tell you if the library owns an electronic version of the item. In this case it does and you can click on one of the links to get the article.

• If you don’t have time to look at the full-text of the article right then, or if you’re not sure how to get the full-text for whatever reason, you can always look it up later as long as you still have the citation. This is why it’s important to save the citations that look really good and we’ll see how to do that in just a minute. But I want to emphasize, at this point, that, in general, in your research, it’s always good to save complete citations because you never know when you’re going to need that information again.

• Mention troubleshooting handout – describes common problems they might encounter

D. Save results into MySearch Tools

• Let’s take a look at how Quick Search results interact with MySearchTools. I’m going to click on the plus sign to send an article into MySearchTools.

• Then I’m going to go into MySearchTools. I see all the articles that I’ve saved at various points in time to my basket.

• Remember that if you aren’t logged in, it will only save what you send to MySearchTools for the length of time that you’re in SearchTools. You must log in to save them permanently to your MySearchTools.

• Just like we did when we saved our databases to a folder or a set, we can create a new folder and save results (in other words, the citations) on a particular topic here [do not need to demonstrate this again].

E. Evaluate quality of results (versus quantity)

• Let's take one more look at our Quick Search results. Notice how some of the more interesting and/or more scholarly entries are not from the databases that had the most hits.

• For instance, as I scroll down I start to see entries from ISI Web of Science and WilsonSelectPlus that look much more like the scholarly articles that I wanted rather than the articles that I saw on page 1. But if I click on Summary, then I see that Web of Science had only 106 hits and WilsonSelectPlus had 18. So an important thing to remember is that the number of hits from a database will not give you an idea of the quality of the entries that you’ll get. You need to browse through the entries a bit to get some idea of which ones are the better ones and to see which databases they are from.

F. Note that not all databases allow for cross-searching

• Some databases are included in the Find Databases section but don’t appear in the Quick Search section. This is because their interface isn’t compatible with the SearchTools interface so we can’t search them in here with the other databases. Those databases can only be searched individually.

G. Note database sets that are being searched

• Many more databases that are cross searchable.

• For instance, I can go back to the Quick Search page and run this same search in the Social Sciences category. Notice that this includes PsycInfo which is a psychological database and Sociological Abstracts which covers sociology literature.

• Some of the article titles are the same as what I saw in the first search. But others are different and look like they’d be good as well.

H. Demonstrate differences between Quick Search and direct database searching

• Can’t do more than a very rough search in SearchTools. All you can do is put in a few words and do a rough search for those words.

• In contrast, I’m going to go into Find Databases and choose PsycInfo. Then I’m going to go directly into that database and I’m going to do a search of athletes or players and body image or self image. I’m going to limit my search to Peer-reviewed journals and I’m going to ask for empirical studies.

• Different databases have individual features that make them valuable. And the individual databases allow you to combine search terms in ways that you can’t do in SearchTools.

• So the Quick Search part of SearchTools is a good place to go to get a few quick citations on a topic or to figure out what databases might be most productive for a particular topic. But you wouldn’t want to use the Quick Search function for a more sophisticated search or in the belief that it’s going to do a good, comprehensive search of a particular topic.

[Allow play time if you have it. If it is a large class, you might have to divide the class into groups and have each group run their searches at slightly different times so that they don’t crash the system.]

X. Power Search

[Make sure students are not actively searching, but just watching the instructor demonstration – don’t crash the system!]

• Power Search takes the search function of Search Tools a step further than Quick Search. When I go to Power Search, you’ll notice an advanced search screen that allows you to enter multiple terms and to specify which database field you wish to search.

• Notice that you have more choices of which databases to search. Look on the left-hand side of the screen, under the header "Select Search Type." There you will see various choices, including "My Databases," or the personalized list of databases that you created a moment ago.

• When I select "My Databases," remember that not all databases can be searched using the Search Tools interface. Those databases that can be searched in Search Tools will have a check box in front of them.

• You can select up to eight databases to cross-search in Power Search.

• So, I am going to go back to our athletes and body image search, but this time do it in my set of databases. I click on the "Select Search Type" pop-up menu, and select "My Databases."

• On the Advanced Search box, I can choose which fields I want to search. These are pop-up menus also (click on the drop down menu to show fields). I can either accept the default of "all fields," or tell Search Tools to find terms in specific fields.

• I am going to accept the default for this search and put "athletes" in the first field.

• Explain the boolean operator options of and, or, not.

• I will add "body image" to the second search box.

• Then I either select or deselect the databases where I want to search, and click go.

• I now see a search status screen similar to the one that you saw in Quick Search.

• In summary, Power Search is similar to Quick Search in that it allows you to cross-search several databases, but it allows you more choices of which databases to search, and more control over relationship between search terms or which of the database fields you want to search.

XI. Save Previous Searches into My Search Tools

• You can also save specific searches that you’ve done in MySearchTools so that you don’t have to remember what terms you’ve used.

• I’m going to go back to the Power Search page and rerun the search I did. On the Results page, notice that I have an option to view Previous Searches. When I call up that page you can see the + link that allows you to save the search.

• If I go to My Search Tools and look under the "My Saved Searches" tab, I can see previous searches that I have done, and I can run the searches again by simply clicking on what appears under the "query" header.

• So, in general, you will use MySearchTools to save personalized links to journals, databases, specific searches, good citations – anything that you’ve seen in SearchTools that you feel you’ll probably want to use regularly or, in the case of a citation, that you think is really relevant to your research and you therefore want to make sure not to lose.

[Allow play time if you have it. If it is a large class, you might have to divide the class into groups and have each group run their searches at slightly different times so that they don’t crash the system.]

XII. Help

• Show Help tab

• Here you will find brief descriptions of the different functions of Search Tools and more information about how to use them.

• Remind the class that the handouts will have additional information about using Search Tools.

• Ask for questions.

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