Searching Skills; Evaluating Web Sites

AGORA Basic Course: Module 2

Planning a Search Strategy

Steps 1-4: Example – water management issues AND rice production

1. Ask: What water management issues are associated with rice production?

2. Need: scholarly primary research 3. Main Concepts: water, management, rice, production4. Select terms:

a) Broader terms: ‘cereal’, ‘cultivation’, ‘farming’, b) Synonyms: H2O, farming/cultivation, usage/

issues/complications c) Alternative spellings: noned) Plurals: cereal(s) e) Capitalization: be aware of relevancy ranking

Step 5. Select a Source

Step 6. Search: Construct a search using the appropriate commands and best practices

Question: What water management issues are associated with rice production?

Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3 Concept 4

water management pollutionriceissues

5. rice6. cereal

3. issues4. problems

1. water management2. water usage

9 = 1 OR 2 10 = 3 OR 4 11 = 5 OR 6 12 = 7 OR 8

7. production8. cultivation

13 = 9 AND 10 AND 11 AND 12

Step 7. Revise

Review and refine your search• Be prepared to review/revise your search• Keep your search terms in concept

sets/zones but remember to explore subtopics• Try new sources of information • Save the search and citations for future use• Promote use of high-quality resources

Step 8. Manage Results

Step 9. Evaluate-Who? What? When? Where? Why?

• Download, print, save, e-mail results & search history

• Cite using a scientific citation style

• Save search, set up alerts

• Accuracy• Authority• Objectivity

• Currency

• Coverage

Step 10. Apply – Answer the question.

Boolean OperatorsAND Operator

(to combine two concepts)

the AND operator is used to combine two concepts e.g. livestock AND drought – results

are in the combined area of the two circles

livestock drought

the AND operator is used to combine three concepts e.g. bean AND cultivation AND pests -

in the combined area of the three circles

bean cultivation

AND Operator (to combine three concepts)

pests

the OR is a means of combining synonyms e.g. beans OR legumes - in each circle’s area with the overlap in the middle having both search terms

beans legumes

OR Operator (info containing one or other term)

NOT Operator (in one term or the other)

pig NOT guinea – in the shaded area; eliminates items in 2nd term (guinea) or both terms

Other search engine functions• Phrase or proximity searching: “…” or (…)

– allows you to search for an exact phrase, e.g. pests and (bean cultivation)

• Truncation/wildcards: * – allow you to search alternative spellings and

plurals river* for river OR rivers pesticide* for pesticide OR pesticides program* for programme or program• Alternate spellings: ?

– can be used to substitute for characters anywhere in a word

wom?n for woman or women

Africa AND (bean OR maize)

bean maize

Africa

Africa AND (bean or maize) – in the shaded area The (OR) operator retains items in each term and the AND

operator is used to combine two concepts

More Search Techniques

• Field Specific Searching– author, title, journal, date, url, etc.

• Language Restrictions, Humans or Animals and other limits

• Relevancy Ranking – a grading that gives extra weight to a document

when the search terms appear in the headline or are capitalized

– every found document is calculated as 100% multiply by the angle formed by weights vector for request and weights vector for document found

Evaluating Web Information

• Criteria for Evaluation

- Accuracy

- Authority

- Currency

- Coverage

- Objectivity

- Design/Navigation

This is the Google search engine - www.google.com

Queries are typed into the Search box – AGORA FAO in this case

The results for a maize production search in Google

is 18,100,000 – including links tomany types of resources.

Google Scholar – scholar.google.com

provides a simple way to broadlysearch for scholarly literature

This is the Scholar search engine -scholar.google.com

Queries are typed into the Search box – maize production in this case

The results for the maize production search is 1,480,000 citations with

primarily academic type material

CAB Abstracts and AGORA• CAB generously offers a subset of CAB

Abstracts to AGORA users• Also provides full-text articles found in AGORA• Covers 50% of journals in AGORA• To search in CAB Abstracts, you must be logged

into AGORA. • After completing a search in CAB Abstracts, you

can return to AGORA to access the full-text article – if you are properly logged in to AGORA.

Note: AGORA covers many general topics such as management, economics, research, law, population, statistics, etc. not covered by CAB. With the implementation of Summon, you will be able to search probably 95% of what is in AGORA, if not more.

The same search terms – maize production -

will be completed in CAB Abstracts

Results matching this search is

34,852 abstracts

Exercises

This is the end of the AGORA Basic Course Module 2.

Complete the exercises for Modules 1 and 2.

Then, please continue with AGORA Basic Course Module 3: AGORA Portal

Updated February 2015