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Effective Database Use

Keyword Searching? 

Just as your baseball card or your address book has different types of information by which you could organize your information, so does the database. Doing a keyword search or fulltext search is as close to a Google search as you will get in a database -- this searches every word in the article for the words you have requested. You could search for your topic, President Bush, using a key-word search and see what happens. But is there a better way?

Expert searchers rarely do a key word search. They have learned that, just like a search engine, keyword searches return too many articles that have no value to your research.

Instead, do what the experts do

These researchers will usually start with a subject search. Most databases open to a subject search screen for just this reason. A subject search only looks at terms that have been assigned to the article by an indexer. If the subject search doesn't find the information, however, use another type of search.

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