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LANG 3070 - English Communication for Humanities and Social Science Studies II: Seach Techniques

Useful Seach Techniques

The search techniques below can save you time and give you more relevant results than typing blindly into Google or other search tools.

1. Classic Scholarly method: Find References in Your Reading

When you do research, you will find things cited in papers & books you read.  You can then look those up and read them.

Example: I read a chapter in this e-book 

Ho, B.C. and Li. Q. (2013). Rural Chinese Women's Political Participation. In Z. Hao and S. Chen (Eds), Social Issues in China : Gender, Ethnicity, Labor, and the Environment (pp. 23-44.). Dordrecht, Netherlands, Springer. Retrieved from: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-2224-2

chapter example image showing words and highlighted reference

1. You decide to follow-up on the in-text citation as written in the article " In Tong's studies (2003) Chinese men fare better....".   So you go to the full reference below.

reference to: Tong, J. (2003). The gender gao ub political culture and participation in China. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 36(2) 131-150.

2. You then search for the article in PrimoCentral of PowerSearch - very generally - using the title

screen shot primo central search of gender gap political china - over 70,000 resuls

 

Results - 75,000, but the one you want is the top (thank goodness!). Then you read it. This may lead you  to more citations and useful resources.

 

A more efficient search would use advanced search with author = Tong + title= gender gap political china

screen shot of results of advanced search author is Tong and title words are gender gap political china

 

Citation Chaining - Modern Addition to Classic Method

The "classic method" allows you to search backwards.

Now modern tools also allow you to search forwards! You can learn more about Citation chaining in the Citation Chaining Guide & by watching the videos below

Citation chaining helps you quickly find related articles through citations. It is an essential technique to support your literature review process.

You can do backward and forward searching based on an article in hand.

◀◀  Backward searching

A "perfect" article you have in hand

 Forward searching  ▶▶
  • finds articles the author used. These articles are usually called: 

"References", "Cited Articles", "Cited Documents"

  • helps you track classical and foundational studies
  • finds articles who used this article. These articles are usually called:

"Citing Articles", "Citing Documents"

  • helps you track latest development on your topic

"What is Citation Chaining" - Claremont Colleges Library (2 min 3 sec)

Citation Chaining - GoogleScholar - Seattle U

Citation Chaining - Web of Science - UNSW Canberra

Search Smart - Short videos on Search Techniques

Most databases do not support "natural language" searching. But, if you learn some |smart search" techniques, you will be able to target your searching better.. The image below is linked to several short videos to help you learn new and different search techniques.

thumbnails of several short HKUST Library made videos. clicking on this image will bring to the tags "search smart" on the e-learning server

Use Search Fields - "Advanced Search"

Most databases have them!  

Good place for easy field searching

Example in PowerSearch

screen shot advanced search gender and political participation and china OR chinese


Example in Proquest

screen shot of proquest advanced search in abstract for gender and oltical participation and chin OR chinese

Example in Social Science Citation Index

screen shot of web of science - social science advanced search gender and politial participation and china OR chinese

 

Notice how of the fields you can search relate to the information we use to make a citation? That's called "meta-data"

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