LibGuides: BUS 457: Dataset Searching: Search Strategy for Datasets

Search Strategy for Datasets

Datasets are usually posted online with a brief description of their context, and may also be tagged with some related subject terms, depending on which hosting service makes them available online. Some datasets are posted online with very minimal information about their contents, making them hard to search for.

Because of the limited amount of descriptive text we are searching when we search for datasets, we have to carefully consider the keywords we type into the search bar.

A "keyword" is a word you type into a search bar.

Many search engines will require all keywords to be present in the search results. Therefore, each keyword you include in your search will limit your search to only records containing that word, which is a problem if you choose a synonym or related term rather than the exact term used by the creator of the dataset who uploaded it to the web.

Carefully consider which keywords you use for your search. Using too many unnecessary keywords will limit your search and could cause you to miss relevant datasets.

Another challenge when searching is to consider synonyms and related terms. You may not find what you need on your first search (in fact, you probably won't). That means you'll have to approach your search in an iterative manner, changing and tweaking your keywords with each search you run to try to broaden or narrow your search (as needed) until you find relevant results.

After each search you run, based on the results you find, review and tweak your keywords. You may choose to delete some keywords to broaden your search and find more records, you may substitute a keyword for a synonym or related term, or you may choose to add more keywords to your search to make it narrower (finding fewer results, but more highly relevant ones).

Strategies for Generating Useful Keywords

Librarians have strategies for approaching keyword selection. It's difficult (if not impossible) to guess at the beginning of the search exactly which keywords will bring back the relevant records you are looking for.

1. Write out your search question, e.g.

How do earnings differ between college graduates and those who do not graduate from college in the US?

2. Parse your search question and identify the key concepts that must be present in your search result in order for it to be relevant to the question. This is a subjective process. You could write:

College | Graduates | Earnings | US

3. Create a table with one concept per column. Fill in the table with synonyms and related terms.

`College`	`Graduates`	`Earnings`	`US`
`university`	`graduation`	`income`	`America`
`higher education`		`outcomes (broader term)`	`American`
`higher ed`			`By state`
			`U. S.`

4. When searching, substitute keywords for other related terms based on the outcomes of your search.

5. Optional: Some search engines (including the Oregon Tech Library) will allow you to place the OR operator between synonymous terms so that your search will bring back any synonym, then use the AND operator to combine concepts. Use the format:

(college OR university OR higher education OR higher ed) AND (graduates OR graduation) AND (income OR earnings OR outcomes) AND (US OR U.S. OR "by state" OR U.S.)

Tips:

Place parentheses around sets of synonyms, separated by OR
Place AND between each set of parentheticals
Use double quotes around phrases of multiple words when the words must be found in the exact order specified, e.g. "high blood pressure"
Do not use the AND and OR operators in Google Dataset, but they will work in the Oregon Tech library search bar. Learn more about AND and OR on the Library Search Bar page of this guide.

Assignment Prompt: You don't have to do anything after reading this section, but you will need these skills to complete the other sections of the assignment! Proceed to the next section in this guide, Google Datasets.