ENGL 1102 - Minton: Searching Tips and Tricks

Take some time to think of the best keywords to enter and be ready to change them as you pursue your topic.  Get ideas for new keywords by carefully examining the title, abstract and subject fields in your first results.  If the database you're using has a thesaurus of terminlogy, use it!

Try these search features:

• Use boolean operators to combine search terms

AND will narrow down your results to those that contain the keywords or phrases you are combining
OR will increase your results to those that contain one of the keywords or phrases in your search
NOT will make sure you get results that do not include irrelevant terms

• Use quotation marks to search for a phrase ("The Fox and the Hound" or "symbolic logic", for example)

• Set search limits such as scholarly journals, full-text, or document type

• Sort results by date or relevance

• Look for subjects to narrow your search

For books in the catalog, try suggested topics at the top of your search results page
For the databases, try the thesaurus (if the database has one) or finding a relevant citation and using subject termsfrom it

• Use truncation (strateg* will find strategic, strategy, strategies, for example)

• If you’ve found an article in full-text, you can:

Use the email feature to send the citation and the article, or
Save the article, or Print the article