AHIMA Library Research Resources
Tips to make your searches more successful
Web searching
A comprehensive search of the web is impossible, because different search engines search different sites in different ways and, more importantly, because a large percentage of what is available on the Web is part of what is referred to as the hidden web. If your research involves searching the Web, it is well worth your time to learn how to use web search engines more effectively. While Google is the most popular search engine, you should try several different search engines to achieve a more comprehensive web search.
Advanced search help:
Some web searching tutorials:
Searching using structured language
- Controlled vocabulary searching.
One of the most effective ways of searching a database like PubMed is by using controlled language terms, like the medical subject headings (MeSH), to which content is indexed.
- Records and fields in a database
If you familiarize yourself with the structure of records and fields in a database, it will help to find specific information more quickly. For instance, if you know the author or a word in the title of an article in the BoK, you can pinpoint the information you are looking for more quickly by using the option to search fields on the advanced search page.
Boolean concepts -- Boolean search operators (and, or, not, near, etc.) allow you to focus your search from the beginning without having to go back and refine it later. Help for using boolean search operators in the BoK is available here. For a visual explanation of boolean search logic, take a look here. Check out the "Fun Boolean Exercise" on this page.
Natural language or keyword searching
If you are using a search engine that touts itself as a natural language search engine, such as the one on the AHIMA web site, it is important if possible to understand how the search engine interprets your search query, and adjust accordingly.
[Note: Incorporate information about Verity (the BoK and CoP search engine). Additional search tips are available on the CiteLine web site concerning search operators, automatic stemming and other things you can do using the Verity search engine - http://www.citeline.com/client/citeline/3.0/advanced_query.html]
Truncation and wild cards
While boolean operators are fairly uniform from one database to another, truncation and wild cards vary from one database to another. Help on truncating search terms in the BoK is available here.
Tips and tutorials for searching specific databases/web sites
The College of St. Scholastica has developed some tutorials for searching some of the proprietary databases available to their students:
Sample searches for some public databases and the web
Additional tips
- PubMed using MeSH terms and limits.
- Link to View Details to see how the structured language.
Additional resources for search tips:
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