Searching Periodical Databases MIT 026B Winter 2002.

Searching Periodical Databases

MIT 026B

Winter 2002

Database Records

Accession NumberTitleAuthorJournalLanguageAbstractDescriptors

“Record”

“Fields”

CONTROLLED VOCABULARY

AuthorsDescriptors

NATURALLANGUAGE

TitleAbstract

Truncation

Natur*

Nature

Natures

Natural

Naturalist

Naturalistic

Naturalism

Wildcards

M?cDonald

McDonald

MacDonald

Positional Operators

ADJ

ADJ3

WITH

NEAR

Training cats and dogs as pets

Search for articles about:

Training cats and dogs as pets

Training DogsCats Pets

Search for articles about:

List of Documents

How to train a dog to kill people.

The difference between dogs and cats.

Training cats as pets.

Training dogs as pets.

Training your skunk to be a pet.

Why dogs make good pets.

How to train a cat to kill people.

List of Documents








List of Documents








List of Documents








Document/Term Matrix

Train* Dog* Cat* Pet*

Doc. 1 x x

Doc. 2 x x

Doc. 3 x x x

Doc. 4 x x x

Doc. 5 x x

Doc. 6 x x

Doc. 7 x x

Document Sets

“Train”= {d1, d3, d4, d5, d7}

“Dog” = {d1, d2, d4, d6}

“Cat” = {d2, d3, d7}

“Pet” = {d3, d4, d5, d6}

“Dog” AND “Cat”

d1

d4

d6d3

d7

d2

dog AND cat = {d2}

“Dog” OR “Cat”

d6

d1

d4

d2d3

d7

dog OR cat = {d1, d2, d3, d4, d6, d7}

“Dog” NOT “Cat”

d6

d1

d4

d2d3

d7

dog NOT cat = {d1, d4, d6}

Hints for Searching Electronic Databases

• Plan ahead

• Don’t get discouraged

• Be prepared to repeat the search, using different strategies

• Use BOTH free-text AND controlled vocabulary terms

Recall vs. Precision

Low

High

High

Low

Recall

Precision

Search ResultsBuildingBlocks

CitationPearlGrowing

Building Blocks Approach

• Identify the different concepts, or “facets” of the topic you wish to search

• Create a series of terms for each concept• Combine the terms for each concept

together into a single set, using the “OR” operator

• Combine the sets together, using “AND,” “OR,” or “NOT.”

Topic:

Ecological concerns in American poetry

Concept Map

Ecology United States Poetry

Environment* United States Poe*

Ecolog* America*

Building Blocks ApproachConcept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3

Term 1a ORTerm 1b ORTerm 1c



ANSWERSET

AND…OR…NOT

Building Blocks ApproachConcept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3

AND…OR…NOT

Successive Fractions ApproachConcept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3




INTERIMSET

AND…OR…NOT

ANSWERSET

AND…OR…NOT

Fun with Your Thesaurus

• Novel (100 citations)

• Narrower terms:– American novel (25 citations)– Bildungsroman novel (25 citations)– Canadian novel (25 citations)– Postmodern novel (25 citations)

Searching the term, “Novel”:

Novel 100

“Exploding” a Term

Searching the citations for a term AS WELL AS the citations for all the NARROWER terms under it

Novel 100

American novel 25Bildungsroman 25Canadian novel 25Postmodern novel 25

200Citations

Citation Pearl Growing

• Start with 1 or a few documents that are KNOWN to be relevant to your search.

• Investigate the descriptors and natural language terms in the documents and develop a list of concepts

• Use these concepts to find more terms, and collect more documents

• Repeat the process as necessary/desired.


TitleAuthorAbstract

Descriptors


Title

Author

Abstract

Descriptors

Title

Author

Abstract

Descriptors

Knowledge Growth

GeneralRelativity

QuantumTheory

(quantum ADJ theory) AND (general ADJ relativity): 45

45

Knowledge Discovery

VibrationTheory

QuantumTheory

(quantum ADJ theory) AND (vibration ADJ theory): 0

Knowledge Discovery

• The detection of patterns in large data stores which leads to the extraction of previously unknown, potentially useful knowledge.

Knowledge Discovery

VibrationTheory

QuantumTheory

Searching Periodical Databases MIT 026B Winter 2002.

Documents

near slide

training dogs

c term

training cats

american poetry slide

good pets

c answer set andornot

cat d1 d4 d6 d3 d7 d2