Skip to Main Content

Library Hacks for Graduate Students

Essential Tools

Fancy Search Tools

Resources for Your Primary Research

Explore Databases by Type to find: Data Sets, Research Methods, Demographic Data, Tests & Measurements, and more. Meanwhile, the University Archives, Wittliff Collections, and Distinctive Online Open Repositories (DOORs) provide unique resources.

In a research methods course or working on a proposal? Be sure to utilize SAGE Research Methods for access to a project planner, foundational material, books, videos, datasets and tools for conducting research. Applicable to multiple disciplines. 

 

Search Operators & Modifiers Cheat Sheet

Operator Example What It Does
AND policy AND homelessness AND australia only locates resources containing all three keywords
NOT vikings NOT "tv show" NOT "tv series" eliminated information you do not want (e.g. locates resources about Vikings, not the TV series)
"   " "world health organization" AND "immunization rates" only locates resources with the exact phrase in "quotation marks"
TO "birth rates" 1970 TO 1980 locates resources within a specific date, measurement, or range (very useful for historical and statistical data)
site: "food scarcity" AND florida site:edu locates resources only from URLs ending in .edu
OR sustainability OR conservation locates resources containing at least one of the keywords
~ diwali ~desserts locates resources with synonyms for the search term, e.g. pudding, cake, sweets
? wom?n AND organi?ation AND defen?e wildcards (? ! $) substitute a symbol for one letter of a word, locates resources with different spellings (e.g. American vs Australian)
* genetic* AND child* truncation locates resources containing all words beginning with the root word (e.g. genetics, geneticist, genetically AND childhood, children, child)
( ) ("population growth" AND taiwan) AND health OR medicine nesting locates the most relevant information first by putting greater emphasis on the terms in brackets (just like Order of Operations in mathematics)
^ "game addiction" AND adolescent* AND ("mental health"^5) weighting puts particular emphasis on one term over another in your search, prioritising the weighted term over the other search terms in the string

N

(near)

 tax N5 reform finds the words if they are within X number of words of one another regardless of the order in which they appear (e.g. tax reform as well as reform of income tax)

W

(within)

 tax W8 reform finds the words if they are within eight words of one another and in the order in which you entered them (e.g. results that would match tax reform but would not match reform of income tax)

Adopted from the Australian National University.