More Search Tips: Gale Virtual Reference Library

This page contains the following tips and strategies to improve your searches in Gale Virtual Reference Library:

• 1. Search by Document Title, Keyword, Entire Document or Subject
• 2. Add more search terms to narrow results
• 3. Use logical operators and wildcards
• 4. Use plural or other word endings
• 5. Try using synonyms for your original words
• 6. Target your search with Advanced Search
• 7. Search by page number
• 8. Refine your search results
• 9. Check your spelling
• 10. Browsing an eBook

1. Search by Document Title, Keyword, Entire Document or Subject

If you would like to search across the entire eBook collection, Basic Search offers these ways to progressively broaden your search:

• by Document title focuses your search on only the titles of articles and entries, allowing you to go directly to an article or entry (you may enter all or part of a title)
• by Keyword this is a good starting point for your search. The system will look for your search terms(s) in the most comon places associated with a document (such as titles, authors, index terms, etc.), but stops short of searching the full text of an article.
• by Entire document searches everywhere in the article, plus the fields of data about the article. This search option is recommended when searching for jargon, new terminology or more abstract topics and when a search by keyword is not producing enough results.

For example, a sample search on web site design may produce these hypothetical results using the these Basic Search options:

• A document title search yields 3 results
• A keyword search yields 18 results
• A entire document search yields 156 results

In addition, you may also initiate a Subject search from the Basic Search page by selecting the Subject radio button. A subject search is a good option when beginning your research and/or when searching for articles that focus on a single topic.

As an example, suppose you are looking for information on Alzheimer's disease. If you need a general overview of the topic or are looking for articles that deal directly with the topic, enter alzheimer in the Find box on the Basic Search page then select the Subject option. By comparison, doing a Keyword search on Alzheimer's disease will inlcude all the results found from a Subject search, as well as articles that discuss a specific aspect of Alzheimer's in the context of a another related condition or symptom, but where Alzheimer's is not the main focus of the article. A search using the Entire document option will return the most number of results, and will include everything found by a Keyword and Subject search, as well as articles that simply mention the term, Alzheimer.

2. Add more search terms to narrow results

By using more search terms to narrow your search, you can locate documents that fit your information needs better. This is especially helpful when searching using the Entire document option where a search on a common term, such as cancer, could lead to thousands of results. The following sample results are hypothetical:

• A search on war yields 12,527 results
• A search on war soldier yields 623 results
• A search on war soldier confederate yields 12 results
• A search on war soldier confederate prisoner yields 2 results

3. Use logical operators and wildcards

Most fields allow the use of logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) and wildcards (*, ?, !) to target your search. You may also combine phrases and single search terms in the search box. For example, enter "welfare state" AND Roosevelt.

Broaden your search by using OR

Unless you tell the search engine otherwise, it finds only those documents containing all of the words that you specify. By inserting OR between your search words, you'll find documents that contain as few as one of your requested words. Using OR will increase the number of documents that are found; use OR if your search isn't finding enough documents. For example, type EU OR European Union.

4. Use plural or other word endings

For example, if you are looking for discussions of murder, search for various forms of the word in one of the following ways:

• Use the OR operator as the connector. For example: murder OR murders OR murderer OR murderous
• It is also possible, depending on the desired search term, to use a wildcard character to retrieve various forms of a word. For example: murder*

5. Try using synonyms for your original words

For example, enter nervous breakdown or mental breakdown.

6. Target your search with Advanced Search

Gale Virtual Reference Library supports an Advanced Search that combines criteria such as keyword, image captions, full text, title or ISBN. This option allows you to conduct a search on a particular field (also known as an index). You can also limit search results by publication title or publication date, by subject areas or by audience type.

7. Search by page number

One of the Advanced Search indexes is "Start Page." to restrict your search to one or more specific pages in a given publication. The following example uses range operators to search pages 641 through 676 of the College Blue Book, Edition 33, which is the same as (SP (>640)) AND (SP (<677)) and where the publication title selected is "College Blue Book".

Note that you can also use the Start Page index and Publication Title along with other indexes (such as "Keyword" and/or "Entire Document") to further focus your search to specific words within a page range of a given publication.

To find page numbers, see Tip 10 on how to browse an eBook and view the eTable of Contents.

8. Refine your search results

From your search results list, you can further narrow your results using the Search sidebar at the left. Depending on the type of search performed, you may be able to limit your results to one or several kinds of articles, or by publication date. For example, you could view only results matching a specific document type (such as "Biography" or "Topic Overview") by making a selection from the list. Then click GO to re-display the results list. To view your original list of results again, remove any search limits (for example, select *None selected* as the document type) and click GO.

9. Check your spelling

If you type litrature instead of literature, your search won't find any matches. Tip: Click the Dictionary link on the toolbar if you need spelling assistance.

10. Browsing an eBook

Another way to use this database is to simply select a title from the Basic Search page that you wish to browse. Click View publications to display the list of available titles for each subject area. Then click the hyperlinked publication title. The system will display the About this Publication page, where you can link to the eTable of Contents.

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