SOCY 1190 - Chemical Dependency: Finding Articles

College research often requires in-depth analysis of your topics. Enter keywords related to your chemical dependency topics into the databases to find specific, detailed research and review articles.

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: "opioid abuse"

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

And—narrows a search by inclusion.

Example: opioid AND addiction retrieves only sources that include both search terms, which limits the number of results.  

Or—expands a search.

Example: treatment OR therapy will retrieve sources containing either term, expanding your pool of resources.    

Not—narrows a search by exclusion.

Example: addiction NOT alcohol 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: therap* retrieves therapy, therapies, therapeutic(s), therapist

Federated searching allows you to select and search across various subject databases at the same time. The video below shows how to set up a federated search in the Academic Search Complete database.