Tip!
Are you finding too much information or perhaps not enough? Use alternative, narrower, or broader keywords to vary your results.
Create Your Keyword Strings
Once you have determined your topic and your keywords, it is time to start your search. Knowing how to combine your keywords will help you find the best resources to meet your assignment needs. Using the Research Keyword Worksheet from Identify Keywords, study the sample search:
Sample Search
Boolean searching is the traditional way to search for information in most online databases and on the Internet. Boolean operators are connector words (AND, OR, and NOT) used to create phrases and concepts based on specific rules of search logic. Along with the connector words, you can:
- Use quotation marks ( " " ) around phrases (two or more words); this tells the database to look for the words in that specific order.
- Use an asterisk ( * ) to find multiple endings of one word.
General Search Strategies
The easiest way to search for information electronically is to enter a couple of keywords into the search box of the resource and see what type of results you get. This strategy, however, will often result in too few, too many, or irrelevant results.
In order to retrieve the most relevant results, you will need to construct a search string. A search string is a combination of keywords, truncation symbols, and boolean operators you enter into the search box of an electronic library resource or an Internet search engine.