Have you ever struggled to find what you are looking for in a database or search engine? These tips and tricks can help you get more specific, manageable, and relevant searches, whether you're looking on Google or a library database!
YouTube Demonstration: Search tips and tricks
Once you’ve developed a research topic, use keywords to search library databases. Keywords are the most essential facets of your search - the unique words that will show up in similar articles in a database.
| Research Topic | Keywords |
|---|---|
|
The impact of social class on women’s mental health |
|
You also want to generate related terms that you can search. These are ideas related to your keywords that might also be used in the literature.
| Keywords | Synonyms |
|---|---|
|
Social class |
|
| Women |
|
| Mental Health |
|
Now that you have your keywords, combine everything with boolean operators and punctuation!
| Trick | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| AND (must be in caps) | Use “AND” to find materials that contain both terms | women AND class |
| OR (must be in caps) | Use this word between related concepts when you want to search for either one word or the other, but not both at the same time. The search engine will pull up articles with either term. | woman OR female OR femme |
| NOT (must be in caps) | Use this word to exclude terms from your search. | mental NOT physical |
| Quotations " " | Use quotes to search for a multi-word concept or phrase exactly | "mental health" |
| Asterisk Symbol * | Use * to include alternate word endings | e.g. depress* would search for depression, depressed, depressive, etc! |
| Question Mark ? | Use a question mark to include variations in spelling in your search | wom?n will search for woman, women, womxn |
| Parenthesis ( ) | Use brackets to create separate groups of actions in your search. Each group of keywords needs its own set of brackets, like order of operations in math | ("mental health" OR "mental illness) AND (wom?n OR female*) |
Put together your keywords, boolean operators, and punctuation. You might get something like this using our example above:
("social class" OR "class status" OR "socioeconomic status" OR poverty) AND (wom?n OR female* OR femme*) AND ("mental health" OR "psychological health" OR "mental illness" OR "mental wellness")
These tricks work in nearly all search engines and databases! Try out some examples using the worksheet above!