Database Tips

• Use the right database. Don't look for more general articles in a statistical database, for example.
• Take time to learn different databases's search interfaces; it will be worth it in the long term.
• Use the right search terms to focus your searches. Different disciplines often use different terms when referring to similar concepts. Notice how results expand or narrow or become more or less meaningful with the use of synoymns.
• Eliminate redundant terms. For example, when using "Education Abstracts" don't use "education" or "school" as a search term.
• Use logical operations to focus your search. Ovid and OCLC provide methods for combining terms with "and" and "or" operators.
Effective use of these operators, along with good search term selection, can dramatically improve search results.
• Save your results on disk or by e-mail. You can lose work for a variety of reasons: you inadvertently close the results window; your session times out (OCLC sessions time out after 10 minutes, for example); a hardware or software fault on the database server can wipe out results.

Options:
• E-mail results to yourself. Some databases e-mail query logic along with the search results. The logic can be pasted into the database to reproduce the results at a later time.
• Save results to a USB (flash/jump/thumb) drive.
• Save results to http://webshare.uchicago.edu. Login with CNET id and password.
• Don't hesitate to ask SSAd Library staff for help!
• phone: 773-702-1199
• e-mail: ssad@lib.uchicago.edu