Fascinating discovery today. It seems due to the volume of published research finding what you need is a science in itself. Understanding search indexes and types of search strings will help in trying to get the most relevant and insightful articles and journals for your topic. It seems the CSU library uses primo and other platforms to store and index the copious quantities of published, peer reviewed research out there in the wild.
My take on each of these follows and I have tried to be as helpful and amusing as I can while also trying to learn myself along the way.
Boolean Operators
So this sounds like a highly technical, programming based approach to searching. The concepts of AND, OR and NOR all make me shudder a little inside thinking back on the the process of learning boolean algebra. While running my searches I found the more specific you are (so lot’s of AND’s not OR’s) and using multiple keywords and phrases in quotes helped a lot.
Proximity Searching
Proximity searching allows you to search based on how closely two or more search terms appear in the search results. This is useful when you are looking for concepts that might be expressed by multiple different phrases. For example, if you did a regular phrase search for “curriculum theories,” you would not retrieve documents mentioning theories of curriculum, theories involving curriculum, theories about curriculum, or other similar phrases. But, if you were to do a proximity search, and look for the term curriculum appearing within a number of certain words (or less) of the term theories, you would be able to retrieve many phrases formed with those words.
Proximity searches use operators to designate how closely, and in what order, you want the search terms to appear. Typically the proximity operators are composed of a letter (N or W) or word (NEAR) and a number (to specify the number of words appearing between your search terms). Databases vary significantly for the highest number you can select, anywhere from 10-255. Remember, the lower the number, the narrower the search.
Truncation Searching
Truncation is used to search for terms with different word-endings. This is another way of making your search broader, and getting more results. In Primo Search, and in most databases, including CINAHL, the truncation symbol is the asterisk ( * ).
Example: teach* will search for the words teach, teacher, teachers, teaching etc
All new things learnt with little practical knowledge outside of perhaps engaging in a research role …. not perhaps something I would be looking for as a career change going forward!
As an aside I found by far the best search was the simplest. Start with a broad keyword phrase and (literally AND) become more specific with each keyword or phrase. So for me primo search phrases like;
Sample 1 – “web development” AND “artificial intelligence”
Sample 2 – “artificial intelligence” AND “adoption” AND “web development”
…etc worked best. I didn’t bother with OR or brackets or worried too much about truncation or proximity. Depending on your topic selection you might find you will need to use these if your topic is quite specific.