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Searching Skills; Evaluating Web Sites
AGORA Basic Course: Module 2
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Planning a Search Strategy
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Steps 1-4: Example – water management issues AND rice production
1. Ask: What water management issues are associated with rice production?
2. Need: scholarly primary research 3. Main Concepts: water, management, rice, production4. Select terms:
a) Broader terms: ‘cereal’, ‘cultivation’, ‘farming’, b) Synonyms: H2O, farming/cultivation, usage/
issues/complications c) Alternative spellings: noned) Plurals: cereal(s) e) Capitalization: be aware of relevancy ranking
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Step 5. Select a Source
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Step 6. Search: Construct a search using the appropriate commands and best practices
Question: What water management issues are associated with rice production?
Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3 Concept 4
water management pollutionriceissues
5. rice6. cereal
3. issues4. problems
1. water management2. water usage
9 = 1 OR 2 10 = 3 OR 4 11 = 5 OR 6 12 = 7 OR 8
7. production8. cultivation
13 = 9 AND 10 AND 11 AND 12
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Step 7. Revise
Review and refine your search• Be prepared to review/revise your search• Keep your search terms in concept
sets/zones but remember to explore subtopics• Try new sources of information • Save the search and citations for future use• Promote use of high-quality resources
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Step 8. Manage Results
Step 9. Evaluate-Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• Download, print, save, e-mail results & search history
• Cite using a scientific citation style
• Save search, set up alerts
• Accuracy• Authority• Objectivity
• Currency
• Coverage
Step 10. Apply – Answer the question.
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Boolean OperatorsAND Operator
(to combine two concepts)
the AND operator is used to combine two concepts e.g. livestock AND drought – results
are in the combined area of the two circles
livestock drought
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the AND operator is used to combine three concepts e.g. bean AND cultivation AND pests -
in the combined area of the three circles
bean cultivation
AND Operator (to combine three concepts)
pests
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the OR is a means of combining synonyms e.g. beans OR legumes - in each circle’s area with the overlap in the middle having both search terms
beans legumes
OR Operator (info containing one or other term)
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NOT Operator (in one term or the other)
pig NOT guinea – in the shaded area; eliminates items in 2nd term (guinea) or both terms
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Other search engine functions• Phrase or proximity searching: “…” or (…)
– allows you to search for an exact phrase, e.g. pests and (bean cultivation)
• Truncation/wildcards: * – allow you to search alternative spellings and
plurals river* for river OR rivers pesticide* for pesticide OR pesticides program* for programme or program• Alternate spellings: ?
– can be used to substitute for characters anywhere in a word
wom?n for woman or women
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Africa AND (bean OR maize)
bean maize
Africa
Africa AND (bean or maize) – in the shaded area The (OR) operator retains items in each term and the AND
operator is used to combine two concepts
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More Search Techniques
• Field Specific Searching– author, title, journal, date, url, etc.
• Language Restrictions, Humans or Animals and other limits
• Relevancy Ranking – a grading that gives extra weight to a document
when the search terms appear in the headline or are capitalized
– every found document is calculated as 100% multiply by the angle formed by weights vector for request and weights vector for document found
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Evaluating Web Information
• Criteria for Evaluation
- Accuracy
- Authority
- Currency
- Coverage
- Objectivity
- Design/Navigation
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This is the Google search engine - www.google.com
Queries are typed into the Search box – AGORA FAO in this case
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The results for a maize production search in Google
is 18,100,000 – including links tomany types of resources.
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Google Scholar – scholar.google.com
provides a simple way to broadlysearch for scholarly literature
This is the Scholar search engine -scholar.google.com
Queries are typed into the Search box – maize production in this case
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The results for the maize production search is 1,480,000 citations with
primarily academic type material
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CAB Abstracts and AGORA• CAB generously offers a subset of CAB
Abstracts to AGORA users• Also provides full-text articles found in AGORA• Covers 50% of journals in AGORA• To search in CAB Abstracts, you must be logged
into AGORA. • After completing a search in CAB Abstracts, you
can return to AGORA to access the full-text article – if you are properly logged in to AGORA.
Note: AGORA covers many general topics such as management, economics, research, law, population, statistics, etc. not covered by CAB. With the implementation of Summon, you will be able to search probably 95% of what is in AGORA, if not more.
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The same search terms – maize production -
will be completed in CAB Abstracts
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Results matching this search is
34,852 abstracts
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Exercises
This is the end of the AGORA Basic Course Module 2.
Complete the exercises for Modules 1 and 2.
Then, please continue with AGORA Basic Course Module 3: AGORA Portal
Updated February 2015