IBSS: Keyword searching

To find articles/document on a topic, enter keywords (search terms) into IBSS's search boxes. IBSS then searches for documents that include your keywords in their titles, abstracts (summaries) and other key fields. The following steps will help you carefully identify and organise your keywords so that you're more likely to find the best results:

1. For the purpose of these instructions, we are using the following example assignment/research question: "Investigate the extent to which the possession of social capital influences participation in elections. 
    
2. Identify the words in the assignment/research question that are most relevant to your topic i.e. those words that distinguish your topic from any other topic. Generally, it's best to ignore generic words such as "influence". In our example, you might select the following: social capital, participation and elections. 
    
3. Treat each word that you select from your title as a "separate" concept within the overall topic. For each concept, identify any alternative words with a same/similar meaning (or have opposite meanings e.g. inequality, equality). Different authors can use different language to describe the same concept so your keywords must reflect this - otherwise, you may miss important search results. 

• Plural versions: IBSS automatically searches for both the singular and plural versions of the same word, so if you enter behaviour, it also searches for behaviours.
   
• Using a asterisk (truncation): in some searches, you can increase the number of your results by entering an asterisk at the end of the stem of a word e.g. if you enter participa*, IBSS searches for:
  
  participate, participates, participated, participating
  
  participant, participants, participation, participatory
  
   
• US spellings: IBSS automatically searches for both the UK and US variant spellings of some words e.g. if you enter behaviour, it also searches for behavior. Other common US/UK variants include the appearance of the letter Z rather than S.

• Using multiple search boxes: if your topic contains multiple concepts, enter each concept's set of keywords in its own separate search box. To display additional boxes, click the + add a row button. Don't change the default "AND" setting between boxes - this setting ensures that each search result relates to all the concepts. 
   
• Entering alternative keywords: If you've identified alternative keywords for the same concept, you must enter the word "or" in between each one e.g. "social capital" or "cultural capital". Otherwise, IBSS limits your search results to those that only feature ALL of the alternative keywords.​
   
• Entering phrases: to search for a precise phrase, enter the words within "speech marks" e.g. "social capital". This prevents IBSS searching for each word in a phrase separately, thereby retrieving too many irrelevant results.
   
• Peer-reviewed option: You can select the peer-reviewed option just under the search boxes - this limits your results to those from peer-reviewed publications in which submitted articles are appraised by other researchers and only permitted for publication if they satisfy quality standards. 

• Just below each search result (to the right of its 'Links' button'), are two 'times cited' numbers, each indicating the number of times that the article/document has been cited by other documents. One number links to a list of citing documents indexed by ProQuest databases (including IBSS) whilst the other links to citing documents indexed by the Web of Science database. Follow the links to discover how one piece of research influences another.
   
• If a link isn't provided for a citing article, search the Library Catalogue to check for its availability, first searching for the article title and if that fails, search for just the journal title in which it was published. You may find it helpful to change the catalogue's search box setting from 'everything' to 'journals'.     
    
• You can also re-sort your results to appear in the order of those most highly cited but note that high citation counts don't necessarily indicate reputable work. Also, recent papers, and documents in newer journals, are less likely to be highly cited.