Glossary of Search Terms

Abstract: A short summary describing the main ideas of an article, book, dissertation or other work.

Boolean Operator or Boolean Logic (note): Boolean operators, also known as logical operators, are used to separate keywords to construct more complex searches. They help make a search more accurate. Some like AND and NOT limit a search; others like OR expand a search. Some search engines instead use a more limited +Require/-Reject option, where inclusion of the symbol "+" before a keyword will return only records that include that keyword while including the symbol "-" will exclude such records. For further information, see Search Concepts and Strategies - Understanding Boolean Logic

Citation: A reference to a work, such as a book or a journal article. Citations provide information necessary for locating the actual work, such as the author, title, publication year, volume, pages, etc.

Controlled vocabulary: Some resources use specific, systematic terms for subjects. For example, the producers of a database might decide to always use the word “blame” instead of sometimes using “blame” and other times using “faulting” or “censure” (to a computer, these are all very different things because they are spelled differently) . Each database can have its own vocabulary, and the controlled term in one resource might not work in another, so look for an index or thesaurus to find out what terms to use.

Field: Each piece of information in a record is contained in a field. For example, many records are made up of an author field, a title field, a publisher field and a date field. How fields are named and what each contains varies from database to database.

Full-text: A full-text database is a resource that provides access to the complete text of an item. In a full-text periodical resource, both the citations and the articles themselves will be available. For further information, see Finding Full-text Articles

Index: An organized guide to the contents of an individual, or collection of, information resources, such as books, journals, etc. For example, there are indexes in the back of many books that list descriptive terms and point to their location in that book. There are also separately published indexes that describe the contents of journals, giving one enough information to locate the contents. Indexes are usually arranged by subject, author or keyword and may include abstracts.

Keyword(s): A word that appears somewhere in a record – in the title, in an abstract, as a subject term or identifier. A word searched for using a search engine. Keywords are searched in any order. Use spaces to separate keywords in simple keyword searching.

Phrase Searching (note): More than one keyword, searched exactly as keyed (all terms required to be in documents, in the order keyed). Enclosing keywords in quotations " " forms a phrase in many databases.

Search Engine: Software that searches for data or records according to keywords selected by the user. Features supported and symbols used by the software, such as Boolean operators and truncation symbols and wildcards, are frequently available by selecting the "help" or "search features" function.

Thesaurus (note): Searchable controlled vocabulary feature for subject fields in indexed databases that contains definitions, broader and narrower terms, cross-references, and notes.

Truncation Symbol or Wildcard (note): A truncation symbol is a mark put at the end of a word to find all variant endings of that word . To do research on computers, and also to make sure you pick up records with the word computer or computing or computerized, put a truncation symbol at the point in the word where various endings can begin to occur, comput?. A wildcard is a symbol used to replace a letter in the middle of a word to account for variant spellings or forms. Wom?n can be used to search for both woman and women. Databases use various symbols for both purposes such as $, #, +, *, !, ? Some databases truncate automatically.