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Native American Research Tutorial

First Search: Advanced Searching

The Advanced Search screen provides more options for refining a search. The following lesson will highlight some of the features of Advanced Search.

1. Adding more terms to a search

Enter search terms. In this case, we are interested in economic development for Native American tribes. So we are adding a qualifying term. The Boolean operator "and" means that all of the records must include both the phrases economic development AND Native Americans. This will help get rid of articles about other countries and groups.

The results: Note that this narrows down the topic considerably. Also, note how in this database you can view the entire article. Some databases provide this option for all or select material. Some provide only citations and abstracts. If you find only a citation, look for the journal name in the SJC Periodicals List. If SJC does not have the title, see the Reference Librarian about InterLibrary Loan.

2. Combining searches terms.

Return to the advanced search screen. Enter a new search for "Native American" OR "American Indian." Click on search to execute this search. Be sure to change the operator to "OR." This is the only way to get all of the records that use either term.

Don't worry about the number of hits for now.  From here, click on "Previous Searches" on the left side of the screen.

Here you can see a list of your previous searches. Click on the boxes in front of each set of results. Now we want to combine these two searches using AND. This means that the computer will look for all of the records that include the terms "Native American" OR "American Indian" AND "economic development."  Be sure to combine the sets using the AND operator.

The results: Note how this produced more results than searching only for Native Americans and economic development. But it narrowed the search considerably from the original search for economic development alone.

3. Using subject headings

There are several ways to explore subject headings/descriptors.

a. First, you can do a keyword search like the one above and look at the record to find out which subject headings were assigned to it. Let's take a look at the first citation on the list.

The first subject heading looks like it could be related to our research on economic development and Native Americans. Click on it to see all of the other articles that have been assigned the same subject heading/descriptor.

The results: An additional list of 17 items. Some of these are the same is in the keyword search. But let's click on the second item to see how it differs.

Note that the record does not contain the keywords economic development or Native American or American Indian. Yet it still might be useful in research on economic development. The new subject headings also might alert you to an area that you had not thought of originally, banking and loans. Many databases also use geographic descriptors. These can be helpful in narrowing a search to a specific tribe, region, or reservation.

b. You can also search using subject headings from the Advanced Search screen. Let's look for material about tribal sovereignty. Enter the terms into the search screen. On the column on the right, be sure to scroll down and click on "Subject." The computer will look for the words only in the Subject field.

The results.

Let's take a look at the first citation.

The results:

C. There is one more way to look for subject headings. You can browse and search the subject index. Let's go back to the Advanced Search Screen.

Enter the term that you want to search for and click Browse.

Results: This shows the number of items that include sovereignty in the subject/descriptor field. Click on it.

This takes you back to the Advanced Search screen. Here you click on "search" and continue as in previous searches.

Browsing subject headings/descriptors is a good way to see what a particular database uses to describe specific tribes.

For example, let's look for headings for Lakota in Social Science Abstracts. Select the database in Advanced Search. Click on subject from the drop-down menu in the Search for box. Click on the icon to the right of the box.

This takes you to the screen where you can browse all of the indexed fields. Type in "lakota." Select Subject from the drop down menu next to Indexed in. Click Browse.

Note that Lakota does not appear in the list. This means that it is not a term in an authorized subject heading in Social Science Abstracts.

So let's look for another term, Sioux.

Sioux appears four times in the Subject Heading field. Clicking on the term will send you back to advanced search, and it will automatically paste the selected term into the search screen.

Here is one of the results. Note that the term "Sioux" refers to the Sioux City and not the tribe.

It appears that Social Science Abstracts does not use the term Lakota or Sioux as a subject heading. In order to find material on Lakota, let's try a keyword search. Go back to the Advanced Search screen and type in Lakota or Sioux. Make sure to change the field to Keyword.

Results. Note that Lakota was picked up in the titles of some of these. Let's take a look to see how Item Four was indexed.

Note the subject headings. They have indexed this under Dakota Indians, even though more common terms might come to mind. Thus, when doing a subject search, keep in mind the many ways a term might be expressed. You might need to do both a subject and a keyword search to find Native American materials.

The next lesson will highlight some special features of First Search.

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