searching for literature(salford university)

Information skills are necessary for us to carry out our dissertation . We have to learn how to search for literature in various databases . This seven steps will help us for an efficient & effective search.
STEP ONE
We have to clarify the search question very well.Vaguness & being too complicated can lead to uneffective search.One method which help us is to phrase our topic as a question.
STEP TWO
We have to break the question down into distinct conceptswhich are called building blocks in the search strategy.We should avoid using ambigious words by substituting them with effective words or phrases.
STEP THREE
We can search by index termswhich are key words that describe the subject of a literature in the best way.But in this way we may miss some articles or retrieve some irrelevant articles.
STEP FOUR
Text word searching means that you use a term that describesthe concept you are interested in ,to search for it's existence in either the title or abstract field of the database record.Truncation allows us to search for words beginning with the same stem using a pre-designated symbol.$ or *.Wild cards allows us to search for words which have alternative spellings,and can be particularly useful to obtain articles with either english or american spelling.
STEP FIVE
In order to combine different concepts of our search question we can use boolean operators which are logical operators enabling us to broaden or restrict a search.The main logical operators are"OR" and "AND".
STEP SIX
In order to further reduce the number of articles retrieved or restrict our results to certain type of methodology or types of patients we have two ways.the first is to add another concept to our search strategy and the second is to use the limit function by age,year,language or publication type.
STEP SEVEN
Saving our search strategyin order to return it at a later time.

searching in the internet & fishing

we can compare main parts of information searcing process in the internet with the main parts of fishing process as below:

fisherman as searcher or user
fish as scientific message(textual,visual ,sound,...)
fish hook,net as search engine
fish fly as key words
the potential collection of fish that can be caught as databaes
fisherman's basket for fish as n note(saves personal database files)
the edge of fish pool or sea as website(which is equipped whith browser)