Skip to Main Content

ET 106 Introduction To Engineering Technology

Ask a Librarian

Profile Photo
Sarah Wagner
she/her/hers
Contact:
Information Services and Instruction Librarian
(260) 481-6511
Skype Contact: sarah.wagner881

These tips...

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!.  

Quotation Marks

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

Boolean Operators

 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

Truncation & Wildcards

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 #.