Analyzing Your Search Topic



instructor \| listserve \| web board \| project archives \| toolkit

	Course Homepage Course Modules: Online Community Background Information Basic Web Searching Managing Resources Advanced Web Searching Comprehensive Web Search Strategies Course Projects Assessment	Analyzing Your Search Topic I recently had an opportunity to observe a research professional conduct an online search using the commercial Dialog Search Engine. At $20 per hour, the Dialog Search Engine is not one that you would want to use to spend hours aimlessly searching on general topics. This researcher had already spent several hours refining his search topic, planning his search strategies, and creating his search strings using Boolean operators. When he finally logged on to Dialog, all he had to do was cut and paste his search strings into the text field, initiate the search and watch the results come back. In under 20 minutes, Dialog searched literally millions of files on commercial databases and returned a list of less than 100 documents, nearly all of them relevant to the topic. I can’t begin to promise that your web searching will be that productive at the conclusion of this module. After all, the researcher had spent several years developing his skills and was using a commercial search engine much more powerful than those available at no cost on the web. But, you can use some of the same techniques used by that research professional to enhance our web searching. You will start with analyzing and refining a search topic. Open the digital logbook and locate the "Analyzing Your Search Topic" template. Note: A copy of this template is located here on the course website should you want a copy for future web searches. Analyzing Your Search Topic Template Complete the "Analyzing Your Search Topic" template using these steps. Enter your Search Topic in the space provided. Enter keywords that are related to your topic. Add synonyms that are related to your topic. Use a thesaurus if necessary. Add related phrases that you anticipate will be associated with your topic. List any organizations or professional associations related to your topic. Add the names of experts and authors who have written or spoken about your topic. Finally, anticipate keywords, phrases, organizations or authors who may be associated with the topic but not of interest in your research. For example, I did some web research on the world rice market. Webpages related to Rice University, Anne Rice, Jerry Rice and rice recipes appeared as often in my search returns as did webpages related to the world rice market. Keep this template open in your text editor throughout the rest of the module. Don’t worry if you just have a few entries now. As you discover new terms, add them to the list. You will now take another look at the search engines you visited earlier. This time you will be using features that will take you beyond the basic web search. continue

Fresno Pacific University \| School of Professional Studies

Website maintained by Bob Jost \| bjost@josts.net \| last revised Jan. 1, 2002 Copyright © 1998-2002 by Bob Jost & Geoffrey Jost. All rights reserved. No part of this website may be transmitted, stored or recorded in any form without written permission from the authors.



instructor \| listserve \| web board \| project archives \| toolkit

	Course Homepage Course Modules: Online Community Background Information Basic Web Searching Managing Resources Advanced Web Searching Comprehensive Web Search Strategies Course Projects Assessment	Analyzing Your Search Topic I recently had an opportunity to observe a research professional conduct an online search using the commercial Dialog Search Engine. At $20 per hour, the Dialog Search Engine is not one that you would want to use to spend hours aimlessly searching on general topics. This researcher had already spent several hours refining his search topic, planning his search strategies, and creating his search strings using Boolean operators. When he finally logged on to Dialog, all he had to do was cut and paste his search strings into the text field, initiate the search and watch the results come back. In under 20 minutes, Dialog searched literally millions of files on commercial databases and returned a list of less than 100 documents, nearly all of them relevant to the topic. I can’t begin to promise that your web searching will be that productive at the conclusion of this module. After all, the researcher had spent several years developing his skills and was using a commercial search engine much more powerful than those available at no cost on the web. But, you can use some of the same techniques used by that research professional to enhance our web searching. You will start with analyzing and refining a search topic. Open the digital logbook and locate the "Analyzing Your Search Topic" template. Note: A copy of this template is located here on the course website should you want a copy for future web searches. Analyzing Your Search Topic Template Complete the "Analyzing Your Search Topic" template using these steps. Enter your Search Topic in the space provided. Enter keywords that are related to your topic. Add synonyms that are related to your topic. Use a thesaurus if necessary. Add related phrases that you anticipate will be associated with your topic. List any organizations or professional associations related to your topic. Add the names of experts and authors who have written or spoken about your topic. Finally, anticipate keywords, phrases, organizations or authors who may be associated with the topic but not of interest in your research. For example, I did some web research on the world rice market. Webpages related to Rice University, Anne Rice, Jerry Rice and rice recipes appeared as often in my search returns as did webpages related to the world rice market. Keep this template open in your text editor throughout the rest of the module. Don’t worry if you just have a few entries now. As you discover new terms, add them to the list. You will now take another look at the search engines you visited earlier. This time you will be using features that will take you beyond the basic web search. continue

Fresno Pacific University \| School of Professional Studies

Website maintained by Bob Jost \| bjost@josts.net \| last revised Jan. 1, 2002 Copyright © 1998-2002 by Bob Jost & Geoffrey Jost. All rights reserved. No part of this website may be transmitted, stored or recorded in any form without written permission from the authors.