Public policy is a *highly* politicized issue. Finding unbiased resources can sometimes be difficult. Take these two for example:
Both have "generic" sounding names, but the National Center for Public Policy Research has adopted a conservative viewpoint, while The Commonwealth Fund has adopted a liberal viewpoint. Always be cautious about your sources!
Searching library databases is different from searching Google. Library databases are not as sophisticated at understanding what you are trying to find, so we need to be more precise when searching them.
For example, if you search Google with "How do I make hard boiled eggs?" Google will return results with instructions on how to cook hard boiled eggs. If you were to put the same search string into a library database, the database will treat each word as equally important, so you will receive some results that only have the word "boiled," which would not be relevant to your needs. We need to break our question up into only the important words, and then tell the database what combinations of those words we want results to have.
We need to figure out what the most important words are in our question. hard, boiled, eggs, and make are good candidates. Identifying keywords is not an exact science, and it takes practice. See this guide for more tips on identifying keywords, from librarians at Morningside College.
We don't want results that contain only the word "boiled," so we need to group relevant keywords together. We do this by putting quotes around phrases to tell the database that these words should be taken as a phrase rather than individual words. Our keywords are now "hard boiled eggs" and make.
Google is good at guessing that a result may be relevant even if it only has words that mean the same thing as what you searched for. In our example, Google recognized that in this scenario, make probably meant the same thing as cook, so a website with the title "How to cook hard boiled eggs" was considered relevant, even though we never told Google to use the work cook. Library databases are not good at identifying synonyms, so we need to tell it to include other words that might be relevant. For our search, we could also include cook and prepare for make, and "boiled eggs" for "hard boiled eggs." See this guide for more tips on finding synonyms, from librarians at the University of Toronto.
Finally, we need to tell the database how we want to combine the terms. We accomplish this by using Boolean operators. Boolean operators are special words that the database interprets differently, which give the database special instructions. There are three Boolean operators that all databases use, AND, OR, and NOT.
For our case, we want results that contain both keywords, so our search string will look something like this:
But remember, we identified cook as a good synonym for make. We would like to include results that have "hard boiled eggs" and either make or cook. We can do this by using multiple Boolean operators. Now our search string looks like this:
Let's say that we keep getting results for scrambled eggs. We want to eliminate those. We would change our search string to this:
This string returns results that have the keyword "hard boiled eggs" and either make or cook, but not results that contain the word scrambled.
Check out this guide for more information on how to combine Boolean operators, from librarians at MIT.