Quick tips for online searches

The following are brief notes that I gave to students in an upper year bioethics lecture, to support their searches for external sources. These notes are about the process of searching, and not yet about how to assess what you find when searching, or choose between search results etc. They also presume that you are looking for peer-reviewed, academic articles.

As with my other materials, these are meant to supplement rather than replace other local resources. The below is meant only to give a broad introduction, since external research was not required for this course, and thus not something we covered in more depth. It will help to check out other resources like our library’s Studying and Research resources, including guides and workshops.

Background:

This assignment does not require you to conduct additional research beyond our course preparations and the resources listed in the assignment instructions. You can complete the assessment just using the articles linked in this document and from our Quercus materials. You will not necessarily receive a higher score just because you cited unassigned materials. Still, I know many people will want to look beyond our assigned readings, in which case we should cite what we find and use. It is also important to (e.g.) provide citations in support of our empirical claims. If you choose to conduct further research, there are a few basic tips you might find helpful.

Where to search:

There are costs and benefits associated with where we search. For example, using a search engine might direct us to helpful resources, but these can easily be biased by algorithms or lead you to articles you cannot access. Using dedicated databases can help find more precise sources, but may have more of a learning curve. Below I list just some options and recommendations.

• Our library website. Using OneSearch guarantees that you will have access to any search results through the libraries. The library search results will also usually indicate to you when an article is peer-reviewed. It does take practice to use the advanced search options, and you will often find many irrelevant results if you search generally. But this one easy way to ensure you can actually read what you find. https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/
  
  
• Databases with UofT subscriptions. I would focus on JSTOR, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. Benefits: these results will be both accessible and often make it easier to search within a given discipline. https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/popular-databases
  
  
• Philosopher’s Index. A database accessible through UofT’s ProQuest license. Will return results that are specific to philosophy and major bioethics journals. Most results will be accessible through UofT, which can be accessed using the “Get it! UTL” button. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991106771524006196
  
  
• PhilPapers. This database does not have guaranteed access to articles, but is another philosophy-specific database that is more likely to generate bioethics and ethics related literature. It also allows you to explore by sub-discipline and key word quite easily. https://philpapers.org/
  
  
• Google Scholar. A general search on Google will get you all sorts of results, including videos, blogs, misleading websites, etc. A search on Google Scholar will more narrowly return results that are understood to be books and articles. It will not always return the most reliable results, and you may not have access to the articles it returns. Nonetheless, it is a good middle ground between using search engines and using databases, and has some powerful tools. It will also have the benefit of being more familiar to you. https://scholar.google.ca/
  
  
• Various search engines. I say “various” not merely to cover all the different search engines, but also to direct you to use multiple different search engines. Many search engines use biased algorithms and are decreasingly useful for targeted searches, and different search engines will return different results. Avoid relying on one search engine alone. Some common search engines for English results include: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Brave. If you’re using any of these, I recommend mixing them with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Mojeek, and/or SwissCows. These latter engines either send anonymized proxy searches through the common search engines on your behalf, so the results are not tailored to your existing search patterns, or offer their own webcrawl (in the case of Mojeek) independent of the common search engines. In short, they are more likely to display different search results on the same queries.

What to search: choosing search terms

As we have seen in this course, the questions we ask can influence the answers we receive. Similarly, the search terms or phrases we use can shape what articles are returned to us.

Bioethics is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, with evolving language and concepts. So, we should be open to revising our search terms over time. You might find that searching “prodromes” gives you results that “pre-diagnostic symptoms” doesn’t, and vice versa. Searching for “brain death” will often get you more generalist results than “neurological determination of death” or “death by neurological criteria.” Or, you might find terms you didn’t even think to look for in the process of searching! Maybe I am looking for illness narratives and end up learning about “autopathographies.” I can now run another search using this new language to find results I might have missed before.

Recommendations: A good practice for websearches is to consider multiple terms, different combinations of terms, and to revise terms over time. Some recommendations:

• Use our course materials to choose your first search terms. In lectures especially, I will be dedicating time to showing you language from different disciplines, and help to distinguish between technical terms. Review your reading and lecture notes when deciding your search terms. Consider also the language used in the assignment handouts, and in your own thesis or outline.
  
  
• Consider dedicating your first searches just to refining your terms. Look for how people are talking about the issues, the terms they are using, and use this to refine how you search. You might find articles along the way, but make your primary goal figuring out how you’re searching.
  
  
• Use disciplinary terms to help limit your focus. The word “autonomy” gets used in a lot of conflicting ways in everyday speech, many of which are not relevant to our course, discipline, or discussions. You might get different results if you search for “autonomy” alongside “principleism” or “patients” or “philosophy” or “bioethics.” Use multiple terms and combinations of terms to help narrow down your searches, to get more focused and relevant results.

Where else: following citation pathways and context:

While there are different theories and hot takes about what citations are or functionally do, one thing that citations do is show us which people and papers are in conversation with each other (and who is excluded!). This means we can find other possible sources by looking at who is citing whom.

• Looking backward through bibliographies: Maybe there’s a particular reading from class I thought was helpful. I can look at its bibliography and see what sources it referred to. I can then look up these articles, and decide whether any of them are helpful to me.
  
  
• Looking forward through digital indices: We can also go in the other direction to see who cited the paper we’re reading, what others had to say about it! First, you can look at the journal website where an article is hosted. Quite often, there will be a tab or a button to see who that article is “cited by.” Second, you can search for the article on Google Scholar. When you find the search result for the article you want, the bottom of that search result entry will have a hyperlink that says “cited by #”. Clicking that hyperlink will give you a list of all the articles that Google knows to have cited that work. You can do the same in many databases: searching for a specific article will often give you options to search who has cited that article. Meanwhile, just searching the title of the article will often give you results, since the title will appear in any papers that properly cited it.
  
  
• Looking laterally within a journal issue: Sometimes the articles we read will be part of a targeted discussion or special issue of a journal. In some cases, this can mean that authors are not formally citing each other in a way that algorithms will index, instead just saying “John Doe, in this issue, argues that…” Or, they might not have access to the other authors’ manuscripts, and are unable to cite them in advance of publication. It can be useful to look at the journal issue of an article (or a book series etc) to see what else has been written around the same time. It might be that the same journal issue has a dozen articles on the very same topic or issue that you can use! Maybe the whole journal is dedicated to that topic!

Fine-tuning your searches:

Try to use the “advanced options” or “advanced search” functions wherever available to you. These can be really helpful for narrowing down your searches, and most of the time they will have a more intuitive user interface in addition to the option to use short-hand or specific search strings to return precise results. Different databases and search engines will have different interfaces, and will use different codes, so it is hard to give very general advice. Meanwhile, some search engines (looking at you, Google) no longer reliably respond to these tricks. This is why I say they will “usually” or “often” lead to certain results. Feel invited to use office hours for help refining your searches. For now, some initial guidance:

• Using quotation marks (” “) will limit usually searches to exact spelling or phrasing. So while a search for [mittens for cats] might just show a bunch of cat themed mittens, [“mittens for cats”] with quotes will just return results that specifically mention the phrase “mittens for cats.” Two complications. First, getting too specific can mean you get very few results. If I search [“mittens for six year old stray cats”] I will get no results (except maybe this page once it is indexed!), since my query was too specific. Second, some search engines are no longer consistently registering quotation marks. Again, I would recommend using databases where possible.
  
  
• Logical operators can help structure queries. If you’ve gone through deductive logic in PHL245, you’ll be used to basic uses of conjunctions (and), disjunctions (or), and negations (not). These can be used to structure most searches too. Instead of searching for [patient autonomy] or [“patient autonomy”] I can search for [(patient)AND(autonomy)] to get results that mention both terms. If I’m looking for barriers to reduce jumps and/or falls, I might try [(barrier)AND((jump)OR(fall)].
  
  
• Logical shorthands: An ampersand (&) or plus symbol (+) usually work as a conjunction. A slash (/) or pipe symbol (|) usually work as a disjunction. A hyphen (-) usually works as a negation. So if I am looking for a 1960s or 1970s version of the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” but keep getting the horrible Muppets’ version, I can search [“windmills of your mind” -muppets] to exclude those results. Again, each database or search engine will have its own nomenclature or shorthand. It might help just to use the user interface they provide. Note that you might be used to using a tilde (~) as a negation in logic; the tilde is often used for synonyms. So a search for [~mittens] will often return searches for gloves as well as mittens.
  
  
• Asterisks (*) usually work as wildcards. That means that the search will accept anything in place of the asterisk. If I search just for [“mitts”] then I am unlikely to also get search results including “mittens” unless the result uses both terms, since [“mitts”] is looking for exact spelling and phrasing. But, if I search for [“mitt*”], I will get results that include “mitts” “mitten” “mittens” “mittened” (as well as mittelmus, mittbanan etc). This can be helpful if I’m looking for both autonomy and autonomous [“autonom*”], or trying to fill in a blank in a phrase I can’t remember [“mittens for * year old stray cats”].
  
  
• Limiting searches by year. We have stressed in class that medical knowledge can change a lot in one decade, and many of the issues we will discuss arise specifically out of recent contexts and innovations. More often in bioethics than philosophy generally, relying on older sources can lead us to make false claims. This does not mean we should ignore older research (that would be whiggish!), but it does suggest that we focus on more recent research, especially if we’re not taking additional steps to fact check. In your searches, there will almost always be an option to search by year, or within a specific time window. I recommend using sources from the past five years (2018 onward).

Further support:

Learning to search takes practice, and constant changes to AIs and search engines can sometimes frustrate these practices. If you’re feeling stuck, consider using the further library resources, including the librarians! I’m also very happy to help guide the research process in office hours.

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