Printed books: Karelia-Finna
Ebooks: O'Reilly, Ebook Central
Articles: Ebsco databases (Business Source Elite, Academic Search Premier), International articles' search on Karelia-Finna
Open Access earticles and ejournals: DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journal, Springer Open
Open Access ebooks: DOAB
Theses, research publication etc.: Theseus, Research.fi, Google Scholar
Oona is writing her thesis for a company that aims to ensure the security of its computer and IT systems. The goal of the thesis is to explore the potential threats faced by the company's systems and how the company is currently prepared to handle them. The thesis intends to provide recommendations for what actions the company should take in the future to secure its systems.
Oona is trying to find material for her thesis by googling "small business computer security" and comes across several good results. However, she also encounters a lot of marketing materials from various companies and miscellaneous content that would take too much time to sift through. Additionally, her thesis supervisor requests Oona to find also a few scientific and peer-reviewed sources. She wonders where she can find such sources?
Oona considers she might need to refine her search terms. She thinks about what words would best describe the topic of her thesis. She recalls hearing that in information retrieval, sentences should be broken down into individual words. She contemplates whether the following terms would be good keywords: Small businesses? computer security?
She uses the Finnish General Thesaurus (YSO) and notices that instead of ‘computer security’ YSO recommends using the term ‘cyber security’. YSO also provides tips for related terms such as ‘cyber attacks’ and ‘small enterprises’.
For scholarly articles, Oona searches through the Karelia-Finna database's Business Source Elite. She chooses advanced search option. The database guides her in using search terms, and when she enters ‘cyber security’, she finds an option “cyber security or cybersecurity or internet security or network security or information security”. Synonyms and related terms are joined with the Boolean 'OR' operator". In the second search box, Oona enters ‘small enterprises or small business’
She ensures the Boolean operator is set to AND between two search boxes. Oona narrows the search to full-text articles and obtains the requested scientific articles by checking the "peer-reviewed" option.
Using her identified keywords, Oona also searches elsewhere, such as O'Reilly and Ebook Central, as well as the "International Articles" search in Karelia-Finna. With these keywords, she discovers several excellent sources!