These searching tips, tricks & strategies can be used in most library databases, but you can also make use of them in online search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.
If you have a topic which includes multiple words or phrases, you may want to use quotation marks in your search. Place quotation marks around a phrase you are searching for causes the database to look for the words or phrase together rather than separately and gives you fewer, but more precise, results.
Examples:
theory of relativity = 103,443 results
"theory of relativity" = 60,137 results
Henry Ford = 186,370 results
"Henry Ford" = 163,663 results
The operators AND, OR, and NOT can help you expand or narrow your search:
Examples:
"Wind energy" AND construction
"alternative energy" OR "solar power"
Construction NOT architecture
Using truncation can help you search for terms with varying endings.
Examples:
child* searches for child, children, childhood, etc.
gene* searches for gene, genes, genetic, genetically, etc.
Note: Truncation symbols do vary depending on the resource you are using. Truncation symbols include *,!, ?, and #.
