Keywords
Our library databases have great resources, including thousands of peer-reviewed articles. However, the databases are much more particular about the words you enter. The results will contain the words exactly how you spelled them. For example, a search for "Geology" will not find books or articles that say "Geological" instead.
Also, sometimes the words researchers use are not words that we would use in our everyday life. That is why it is really important to brainstorm possible keywords before you start searching.
For example, possible keywords may be: "hydrologic cycle," anthropogenic, climate change, global warming, biota, etc.
Boolean Words
Boolean words allow you to either reduce the number of results or expand it by either requiring certain keywords, excluding certain keywords, or allowing for alternative words. In library databases, these are AND, OR, and NOT. You can usually just type these in, but many of our databases also have drop-down menu options.
Boolean AND
Using the word AND means that both search terms will be required to be in the results. Most of our databases do this automatically.
For example, 1 would be all articles about "Climate Change" and 2 would be all of the articles about the Pacific. The yellow area in the middle would be the results that have both search terms.
Boolean OR
The Boolean word OR lets you search for synonyms or related terms at the same time, which is very helpful! Google may do this automatically, but our databases do not. So, you can search for "Climate Change" OR "Global Warming" and get more results.
Boolean NOT
Sometimes it is helpful to exclude certain words if you are getting a lot of results that aren't about your topic. For example, if you did a search for "Climate Change" AND Pacific, but you are getting a lot of results about the Pacific Northwest, you can say NOT northwest.
Phrase searching
What other search strategies are there?
In addition to "phrase searching," Boolean operators, and truncation, you can also try using wildcard searches.
Like truncation, wildcard searches will expand your results. 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. Not only will this save you time, but it might also give you alternative keywords you hadn't even thought of.
Here's a table to illustrate how some of these symbols (including the truncation asterisk) typically work.
| 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 | b?t | bat OR bet OR bit OR bot OR but OR... |
REMEMBER: Some databases may use these symbols differently or may use different symbols, so check the database's help section if you're having problems with wildcards.
Thesauri
Sometimes, databases have thesauri that suggest broader, narrower, or related terms.
