Searches 1 - Keywords & Truncation (Factory Farms)

This is the first in a series of posts illustrating how to use our library databases, beginning with searching.

Choosing Keywords – starting with some background information we select words or phrases that commonly but uniquely represent our topic. After we run some basic searches in EBSCOhost or ProQuest the databases will suggest topics or subjects, allowing us to change our keywords to improve our search results. For instance, this CQ Researcher abstract has several keywords highlighted:

Weeks, Jennifer. "Factory Farms." CQ Researcher 17.2 (2007): 25-48. Are they the best way to feed the nation? Most U.S. meat, poultry, eggs and milk come from so-called factory farms or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), where thousands of animals are confined indoors. While they efficiently produce abundant supplies of affordable food, CAFOs also raise questions about animal welfare, public health and environmental degradation. Large livestock farms create huge quantities of animal waste, which produce noxious air emissions and contaminate water supplies when storage facilities leak or overflow. Overuse of antibiotics to keep animals healthy in crowded conditions helps generate drug-resistant bacteria and spread infections in humans. And many critics argue that long-term confinement in small enclosures or cages harms farm animals. Organic and free-range meat and eggs are increasingly popular, but they are more expensive than conventional meat and dairy products, and some organic suppliers are adopting industrial-style methods to keep up with demand. From the CQ Researcher. Reprinted with permission from CQ Press.

I picked words that I thought were specific enough to avoid many 'false hits' - articles that didn't have anything to do with my topic. For instance, I didn't pick 'animals' and 'indoors' since I don't want to read articles about the benefits/problems of keeping your pets inside.

Note that these are the concepts I selected; I could have chosen to focus on the use of antibiotics and the growth of resistant bacteria instead. Now I can take these keywords and group them into concept areas, maybe adding a few alternate keywords along the way:

Concept 1: factory farms, CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations, livestock
Concept 2: environment, waste (also pollution)

Truncation - most of our databases let you use the * (shift-8) character to take the place of any number of characters at the end of a word. This lets us capture various forms of a keyword without having to type them all in. For instance, farm* = farm, farming, farms, farmer, etc. Here are my keywords with truncation:

Concept 1: factory farm*, CAFO*, concentrated animal feeding operation*, livestock
Concept 2: environment*, waste, pollut*

I am careful about how closely I truncate my keywords - poll* = poll, polls, pollster as well as all the keywords I really want (pollut*=pollute, polluted, polluter, pollution).

Now that we have some keywords to work with we can construct searches.