Fill in the gaps with the words in the table. There is one extra word.

online, available,an essay title,library catalogue,to check, to search,reference,specific,produced

University and college libraries usually have ______catalogues.

These allow students_______ for the materials they want in various ways.

If you know the title and author’s name, it is easy _____ if the book is _____, but if you are making a search for material on a _____ topic, you may have to vary the search terms.

For instance, if you have been given _____: “Is there a practical limit on the height of tall buildings?”

I llustrate your answer with ______ to some recent skyscrapers.’ you might try

• skyscraper design

• skyscraper construction

• design of tall building

• construction of tall buildings

If you use a very _____ phrase, you will probably only find a few titles. ‘Skyscraper construction’, for example, only produced three items in one……, but a more general term such as ‘skyscrapers’ found 57.

Task 5

Match the parts of the sentences.

	Beginning of sentence		End of the sentence
	You need to be familiar with	a	produced on a regular basis, containing recent research
	Most library websites have a separate portal or gateway	b	saving the need to visit the library to find a book.
	Their advantage is that they can be accessed by computer	c	the main journals in your subject area
	They are usually available in	d	for searching electronic resources.
	E-journals and other electronic resources such as subject databases	e	are becoming increasingly important.
	Journals are specialized academic publications	f	in paper or electronic formats (e-journals).

Classroom video 1.

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRW7YPLMUU

Task 1

Watch the video and mark the sentences as TRUE or FALSE

1. Some information might be retrievable in an electronic format, other literature can exclusively be accessed in a physical form at a library.
2. The searching results may be disappointing and have to be carefully evaluated.
3. Scholarly search engines allow searching for academic articles.
4. Web search engines such as Google can not be used during research process.
5. University assignments can be considered as vehicles for exploring the literature.
6. Do not spend a great amount of time or space restating your topic.
7. It may be necessary for you to clarify any key terms or concepts in the topic of the paper.
8. Usually a single sentence is all you need to restate your topic.
9. Truncation is a placeholder (wildcard) used in OPAC or database search.
10. Marketability, marketable, marketer are the examples of left-sided truncation.
11. Modelling, modeling, moderating are the examples of multiple character truncation.
12. The advantage of multiple character truncation is that it allows to search for different spellings of the word.
13. The advantage of the single character truncation that it can avoid meaningless results.
14. It is very difficult to find suitable literature sources in complex online catalogues.
15. Library websites have a separate gateway for searching electronic resources.

Task 2

Discuss in pairs. Use the information from the Video.

1. What categories of sources can you name?
2. Can the research libraries provide free digital access to literature?
3. What is the difference between headwords and keywords?
4. What is the starting point of literature research?
5. What are the main aspects of research logic?
6. What categories of sources can you name?

Speaking

Task 1

Discuss with your partner what skills you need to develop to find information easily. Make a list.

1. __________________________________________

2. __________________________________________

3. __________________________________________

Task 2 Study the search techniques described below and define which ones the most useful from your point of view.

How to search

Keyword searches is one of the most powerful ways of retrieving information. First, however, we will explore a couple of other ways of searching.

Author/title searches

Searching by author and/or title obviously assumes that you are searching for a particular author or book or article title, probably in either a database. Obviously particular search engines will vary, but the following are some general guidelines:

ü When searching by author, put the author’s last name first i.e. Kotler, Philip, not Philip Kotler

ü When searching by title, it helps if you enter the title as correctly as possible.

ü If searching for an organization, give the full name of the organization as it commonly appears, e.g. World Bank.

Snowball search

This is a good way of searching if your topic has a key work or author. Look in that work for the key people on whom that author draws, making a preliminary bibliography from that. Do the same for each of the subsequent authors.

Keyword searches

Keywords are a way of searching through subject/topic. Most library catalogues and databases will include an option to search by keyword and an alternative to author and title. Searching by keyword can be very effective, providing you select terms that accurately describe what you are looking for, and ones that are likely to have been picked by other writers on the subject. In fact, part of the reason why keywords are effective is because writers often pick out their own keywords to describe an article, which means that they come up more easily in a search. Some search tools understand natural language, and automatically try and find as many of your words as possible, but not necessarily in useful relationship to one another.

One way of making your search more specific is by using operators from Boolean logic. This way, you can use terms such as AND, OR, NOT, as well as punctuation such as “ “, ( ), to link words together and make ‘search strings’.

Wildcards

Ways of dealing with different spellings: for example, analyse/analyze can be dealt with by placing a ? or * in the place of the ‘s’/’z’.

Truncations

This allows you to search all the variants of a word by putting a * after its stem. It can be useful in dealing with verbal forms of nouns e.g. analys* for analyse/analysis, but take care that you don’t select a root which also applies to many other words. For example, archiv* for archival/archive research would also yield results that relate to archives generally.

Two final points about using keyword searches in individual databases, library catalogues and search engines: individual databases will have different rules about syntax, operators etc. and you are advised to look at their help pages for guidance. Some databases and search engines structure their search mechanisms around Boolean searching, as for example the ‘Advanced search’ option of Google, or that in Emerald’s Fulltext, which allows you to search a phrase (otherwise “ “) or use and/or etc.

Practical task

Make up a 3-minute report on one of the topics:

ü Effective methods of WebSearch

ü Databases for scientists

ü Reference management software

ü Research networks as the sources of information (Google Scholar, Research Gates etc.)