DHE132: Dental Hygiene Theory I

Now that you have an idea of how to begin your evidence-based research, let's learn more about search strategies to help you find the information you need for your assignment. We want you to search smarter, not harder! This page explores using effective search strategies to find library and web sources, as well as discusses tips and strategies for how to search more efficiently.

After reading and completing the tasks on this page, you will be able to:

• Differentiate OneSearch and library databases and identify when to use each tool
• Utilize keywords that are relevant to your research topic in order to quickly retrieve relevant information
• Utilize search strategies to help improve and refine your search results

OneSearch is a search tool that can be a great place to start your search for journal articles, books, and almost everything else the library has in our collection. Using this tool makes it easy to find the resources you need. Try it out by entering your search terms in the OneSearch box and clicking Search:

What about databases?

You can also choose to search individual databases instead. Searching a specific database will provide you with different options to narrow your search that are not available in OneSearch. You will also have less unrelated information to sort through. Listed below are some of the databases the PC Library has in our collection that are related to dentistry and dental hygiene.

Dentistry related PC Library Databases:

Library databases work differently than Google. While you can write a complete sentence in Google and get relevant search results, databases aren't as friendly and require you to use keywords, or words that are related to your research question.

As you develop and refine your topic, you should start brainstorming keywords that you can use to search for sources. There are many different ways to say the same thing, so you might need a lot of keywords!

For example, performing a PICO search using the term "teenager" could also include "adolescent", "youth", or "young adult". Not searching for these words could mean never finding articles that use those terms because the database is ONLY looking for the keywords that are typed in the search box.

Learn more about using keywords from California State University, San Bernardino:

Often, databases will return thousands of results, which is way more than you need or have time to sort through to find relevant articles. Luckily, they provide limiters to help make your search more refined. Once you type in what you're searching for in the search bar, you can use the filters on the results screen to improve your results. Here is an example of how to use filters when searching in the Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source database:

Common Limiters

Keep in mind that not all databases use the exact same language, so the wording might be a little different depending on which database you're in.

• Date of publication: Choose to filter out older dates of publication or search within a specific time frame.
• Peer Reviewed: Limits results to peer reviewed articles, meaning articles that are reviewed by other experts (peers) in the field of their study to make sure the content is accurate and the research methods are sound.
• Publication type: Choose the type of source that you need for your research (book, magazine, scholarly journal, etc.).
• Full text: Limit results to only include complete, full text articles. If you choose not to use this limiter, you can still gain access to articles not found in the database by requesting them through interlibrary loan.

Test your Boolean knowledge!

Search Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches the same kind of articles, books, and other scholarly literature that you would find using the library's databases. It can be a great place to start your research and is useful for:

• finding hundreds of relevant scholarly articles fast
• discovering keywords that define your topic
• helping a beginning researcher identify journal titles and authors connected with subjects of interest
• finding "gray literature" like conference proceedings.

Keep in mind that while searching in Google Scholar is convenient and can be a great starting point, it's unlikely that you will have access to all of the results. Using OneSearch or individual databases means you'll have less to sift through and your results will be more likely to match your needs. 

Setting Up Google Scholar

On-Campus? Google Scholar will automatically display links for access to the full text of search results.

Off Campus? Read our FAQ to find out how to connect Google Scholar to PC library resources.

This section is a derivative of "Using Google Scholar" by University of Connecticut, licensed under CC BY-NC.

Now that you've learned about keywords and creating search strategies, please complete the following activity found at this link. Use the answers that you created in Activity #1 to help you answer the first question.