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Academic Communication for Advanced Secondary Schools Utilising ICT in academic communication

relating to the Internet or narrow it down to pages about the World Wide Web. The
use of brackets can make these operators more powerful. By default, the search
will be carried out from left to right, but using parentheses can group operations
in a way the user defines, making the results even more focused. For example, the
search term “business” AND (“internet” OR “web”) will find pages containing the
word “business” and either the word “internet” or the word “web” or both. In this
FOR ONLINE READING ONLY
example, the use of brackets has narrowed the search down to pages containing the
words “business” and “internet” or “business” and “web”, which can be a handy
feature for complex and advanced searching.
(c) Truncation and wildcards
An asterisk and a question mark can replace a letter or letters in a search term to
find variant spellings or words. This technique is known as truncation and wild card
searching. For example, a search for relig* in a library catalogue will return results
containing the words religion, religious and any other word that begins with the
letters relig. This means you do not need to think of every word. In an academic
database, the question mark generally replaces just one letter within a search term.
For example, type wom?n to search for records containing the words woman and
women, where the question mark occupies the place of the letter ‘a’. However, it is
essential to check the help pages or use the facility provided by the database to find
out exactly which symbol to use, as the symbol allowed may vary between databases.

Observations
• The search is not case-sensitive, so it does not matter whether you use upper- or
lower-case letters.
• By being more explicit in your search terms using Boolean operators, you reduce
the number of results and increase the chances that the information returned will
be relevant to your search.
• Online publications and journal articles, e-books, digital libraries, academic databases
and open-access repositories are a few of the online resources that offer academic
information.
• Truncation and wildcard techniques can be useful in finding variant spellings and
plural or singular forms of words.

Activity 4�3

Choose a topic from the given ones below and formulate search queries using
Keywords, Boolean operators and Truncation and Wildcard to get relevant information
sources from different databases and websites. Then, perform searches using the
queries you have formulated:
1. Gender equity and equality
2. Tax compliance for national development
3. Sports industry in Tanzania

42 Student’s Book Form Five

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