GEOG 1400 - Mapping Technologies: Searching Tips

The articles you select to fulfill your unit reading assignments must be from a scholarly or professional source, thus it is important to be able to identify scholarly and professional source types:

Scholarly Journals

Also known as "academic journals," these sources contain articles written by professionals in a field. The articles are usually research oriented and often contain original research. In the sciences and social sciences they are often illustrated with tables or graphs. These articles will have a list of references at the end. Articles submitted to an academic journal are frequently put through the peer-review process, meaning that other experts on the topic read and suggest revisions to the author(s) before the final version is accepted for publication.

Professional Journals

Also known as "trade publications," these journals contain articles pertaining to specific industries and are of interest to people working in those fields. Trade publication articles tend to be informative and highlight new developments or best practices in an industry.

Use a combination of the following search techniques to create the most effective searches in the library databases. In addition to the techniques below, make use of the database-specific limiters to focus your search more (date range and source-type limiters can be very helpful, for example).

Keywords—Keywords are one way to create search strategies to locate relevant information on your topic. Keywords are the most significant words and phrases associated with your topic.

Quotation Marks/Phrase Searching—Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase.

            Example: “geospatial technologies”    

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

And—narrows a search by inclusion.

Example: "spatial data" AND "augmented reality technologies" retrieves only sources that include both search terms, which limits the number of results.  

Or—expands a search.

Example: GIS OR "geographic information system" will retrieve sources containing either term, expanding your pool of resources.    

Not—narrows a search by exclusion.

Example: "spatial data" NOT "web applications" retrieves only sources that contain the first keyword, eliminating sources for keywords that follow not.

Truncation—Usually using an asterisk*, increases the number of results you’ll retrieve by searching for variant endings of a word root.

            Example: map* retrieves map, maps, mapping, etc..

A database is a collection of sources including books, ebooks, magazines, journals, and newspapers. This short video describes how to run a search in FiSH. FiSH searches most of the library resources using one simple search box. You can use FiSH to search for scholarly and professional journal articles.

To access FiSH, type your keywords into the search box below, or click on the links to access related databases.