STARquest I: Library Services & Resources

How can I do more advanced searching?

Instead of requiring you to enter just a word or phrase, research databases allow you to do advanced searches by combining keywords. Most all databases allow you to:

• Use the word AND to link different concepts

  Example: children and games

• Use the word OR to expand a concept to include similar terms

  Example: games or toys

• Use parentheses to group concepts. This is called nesting.

  Example: (toys or games) and children

• Use truncation to get all the variant forms of a word root

  Example: child*

  This would search for child, child's, childless, childlike, children, and children's, but it might also retrieve other words that begin with child such as Childress (a last name). Not all databases uses the asterisk (*) as a truncation symbol, but most do. Some use $ or ? instead.