How to Develop an Advanced Database Search
Advanced database search techniques reduce research time, provide for more relevant information and allow you to quickly locate the most critical information. All of which are good reason for serious writers to develop advanced database search techniques.
The best writers make extensive use of databases and use the information they find to persuade, inform and enlighten their readers. Great writing skills are still imperative, however, without great research information, the best writers are like guns without bullets, all show and little impact.
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Instructions
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Search and Resource Strategy
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Jot down some concise notes about your topic to find the information in the shortest amount of time. Use the 5W and 1 H strategy, ask the where, why, what, when, and who about your topic. For example, if your topic is wind turbines, you might note the where as California, the why as tax credits and market sales growth, the what as wind turbines, the when as 2005 to 2009 and the who as public companies
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Define the databases you will use. There are thousands of online databases available. Some are fee based, some are free and many are available at your public or college library. But more importantly some are more comprehensive, more accurate and more up to date.
These databases cover every subject imaginable. There are business, medical, history, graphic art and fashion databases and even news databases. You can also find a great deal of statistics, business and technical information in government databases, such as the Securities and Exchange Commissions Edgar database, the United States Patent and Trademark Office database and the United States Economic Census database. The web also is a database of sorts. However unlike a traditional database, it does not have a defined structure. Web site designers don't follow a standard record / field structures that database publishers do.
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Learn the record and field structure of database selected. All databases consist of records and fields. And many databases have not just hundreds of records but millions of records. Each record can have one field or many fields. But the most useful databases often have many fields.
For a simple business address database, each record may have a field for the name of the company, the street address, the city, the zip code, as well as the phone, zip code and URL address. More advanced business databases may also contain text fields that indicate the types of products the company offers, the annual sales and the number of employees.
Most database publishers will indicate the fields that the database has and the current number of records the database contains. Also most reputable database publishers include date fields. Date fields are used to find out when the each specific record was entered or when it was last modified.
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Determine your search fields. From the database's field list determine which fields you will search. A typical field list includes a subject field, an abstract field, a full text field, a keyword field and a category field. Databases also will contain numeric fields to store, for example, financial information, the date the record was created and the record serial number. And some databases will also have graphic fields that store pictures, technical illustrations and clip art.
Define and Refine for Relevancy
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Define your keywords. From your topic notes determine the most critical keywords. And determine which keywords to use for each field in the database. For the previous business example, the obvious keywords would be wind, turbines, publicly traded companies and California. If the database had a state field, you would enter California in the state field. And if it had a product field, you would enter turbine in the product field. Alternatively if the database had an abstract field or full text field, you would enter turbine in the abstract field or full text field.
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Select your Boolean Operators. Most databases support a range of Boolean operators that allow you to narrow or expand your search. The most common operators are the OR, AND, and NOT operators. These operators are sometimes expressed as symbols such as +, | and !.
The AND operator is most often used to limit a search. For example California AND turbines, used within a full text field will only return the records that have both California and turbines within the full text field. . If the database had a state field and a product field, you would enter California in the state field and turbine in the product field and OR the two fields together.
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Refine and alter your search terms, field selections and Boolean operators. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms. For example wind turbines, windmills, wind machines might also result in a successful search. Other words that might be used for turbine include fan, generator, mechanism, and motor.
From your search results determine words to exclude. For example, if you were searching for ocean wave energy and used the phrase, "wave energy", you might obtain results that were also about radio wave energy. To exclude radio results, you could NOT the word radio.
Examine the records that are highly relevant. Look for a consistent pattern of words or phrases in these relevant results to further focus refine your search. For example, if the word electricity was found in most of the relevant search results, AND the word electricity with wind AND turbine to reduce the number of records found and increase the relevancy of your results.
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