Computer Science

Finding scholarly materials can be challenging. There are millions of resources out there, and learning how to get to the key ones for your work will help advance your understanding of the research landscape.

Us librarians collect articles, books, dataset, software, video, images, magazines, and so much more for you to use for your work here at NYU. They are readily searchable via our catalog, and each database will have some searching and faceting for you to use as well.

Picking a search strategy to help you sift through the vast amounts of work will be important, so this guide not only contains links to the resources we collect at the Libraries, but also some tips for how to effectively search each one.

If you don't see the resource you need in our catalogs, you should:

• check if it's openly available elsewhere
• request it using Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
• suggest we purchase it

Creating an effective search strategy means picking some keywords carefully. You can't plug in a whole sentence into academic search engines and catalogs and expect it to work. So when you choose keywords for your search, you would want to include just the main ideas of your research questions.

You can also use some special characters to narrow your search to the most relevant results.

• Quotation marks go around a phrase or set of words that must be exactly together in that order. Putting the phrase in quotes will get you results that use that exact phrase only
  • "artificial intelligence"
• AND can be used to link two topics together to further narrow your search
  • malware AND cyberwar
• OR can be used to broaden your search by linking together different terms or synonyms
  • malware OR virus
• NOT can be used to specifically exclude words from your search to narrow it down
  • malware NOT virus
• * can be used to broaden your search to include various word endings and spellings. The results will include any ending of that root word
  • librar* -- will return results with library, libraries, librarian, etc.
• *, !, ?, or # (depending on the database/catalog) will substitute a symbol for one letter of a word. This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning
  • wom!n -- will return women, woman, womyn, etc.

Order matters when using these special operators:

• Databases/catalogs will usually connect concepts with AND together first
• If you use a combination of AND, NOT, OR operators in a search, enclose the NOT and/or OR words together in parentheses. 
  • "unity game engine" AND (UV mapping OR texture compression)

A note on stop words -- these are common words that many databases/catalogs will ignore.  If included, the database returns far too many results. It's a good practice to just not include these when making your search terms and include the main keywords and phrases only.

Common stop words include:

• a
• an
• the
• in
• of
• on
• are
• be
• if
• into
• which

Material from this box adapted from:

• Keyword Searching - UMGC Library

• Computer Science Research - Wilmington University Library