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Fashion Research

A research guide for finding Fashion reference materials, books, articles, images, career resources, and web sites.

About Searching

When you search library databases, you will use keywords related to your research topic. Then use the keywords to combine them using Boolean Operators into search strings (or phrase searching) to improve your search.  Boolean Operators are simple words (AND, OR, and NOT) that are used to connect and define the relationship between keywords.

Remember that the database can't interpret what you mean, so you have to be clear and specific with your searches in order to control the results.

Phrase Searching

Wildcard Searching

Wildcard searches allow the database to replace the wildcard symbol with any letters that would make up a real word. It's like a shorthand way of typing every possible word that fits the pattern with OR in between.
 
Symbol    What it does   Sample search     Instead of typing
*   replaces zero or more letters at the end of a word 
  (this is truncation)		   comput*   computer OR computing OR computational OR... 
#   replaces at most one letter   ne#t   net OR neat OR next OR nest OR...
?   replaces only one letter   wom?n   women OR woman

Truncation Searching

Truncation is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings.

  • To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end.
  • Examples:
    child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood
    genetic* = genetic, genetics, genetically