IV. Talking to a Machine

Searching is a language game and though your adversary (the database) may have a lot of information in it, it is essentially dumb. The computer sees words a series of letters rather than the concepts they represent. So, for instance, a search on the concept of cats, using the word cats, will not retrieve items where the words "feline" or "cat" occurred instead of cats. Unlike us, the computer does not have the ability to understand the relationships between these words. They must be questioned via "structured searching". Luckily we have a set of conventions built up for structured searching that are very easy to use. 

AND

The AND operator makes sure ALL the terms one requests appear in the search results.

Cats AND Fleas	Cats AND fleas AND Side Effects

OR

Use OR to retrieve records or pages that contains EITHER of two or more terms. OR is frequently used to search
for synonymous terms or a variety of specific ways of expressing a general concept

Cats OR Felines	Cats or Cat or Felines

You can also combine operators using Albegraic equations:

(Cats or Felines) and fleas and side effects
(Cats or felines) and (Dogs or canines)

Truncation: Dealing with Plurals etc.

An easy and important way to broaden your search is to search for variant endings of a word. You truncate the root of the word and search for all the variant endings of that root. It is indicated through a *.

Nur* finds Nurse, Nurses, Nursing, etc.

Comput* finds computer, computers, computingcomputerize, etc.

Car* finds cars, care, caring, etc.

Be careful or you’ll end up with too many hits!

Next: Searching CiNAHL