Using advanced searches in library databases can save you time and yield better results. Here are a few tips and tricks you can use to do this. They can be used for narrowing, expanding, and refining your searches.
AND is used to narrow a search and tells the database to search for sources that have both words.
The illustration on the right shows in blue where finance and crime overlap. That is what would be returned for this search.
Using quotation marks or phrase searching tells the database to search for everything in the quotation marks exactly as they are written. It can be very helpful for narrowing a search to a phrase rather than searching for the individual words scattered throughout the source. It can also be used for finding articles that you have the title of. Simply put the title in quotation marks and search.
OROR is useful when searching for synonyms. It tells the database to look for at least one of the words you typed in. For example:
The illustration on the right shows all the subject circles in blue because all search results that have at least one of those words would show up in your results.
Only using OR can yield too many results. Using OR along with parentheses allows you to use other search terms to narrow the search.
NOTIf you are finding many irrelevant results, NOT can be used to exclude a word from your search. For example, if you are getting articles from the country United Kingdom (UK), you can exclude them by typing NOT "United Kingdom".
In the illustration on the right, the money laundering circle has a piece missing because of the exclusion of the name United Kingdom from the search results. Search results would only show sources that have the phrase money laundering but don't have the name of the country.
Truncating using an asterisk is also a good way to search using synonyms by looking for different endings of words. It saves you from having to search for multiple variations of a word. For example, financ* will return finance, financial, finances, etc. Just be careful not to bring it in too far. For example, fin* would bring up every word in a dictionary that started with fin.
A wildcard can be used to replace a single character in a word and is represented by the question mark. Wom?n will search for both the plural and singular form: women and woman.
