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English 110: Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing Through Literature

Use library resources to locate and evaluate information for your class assignments.

Search Strategies

You have your topic and now it's time to search for your sources.

On this page are tips for searching like a ninja (librarian)! When you search library (or any Internet) resources, it is important to know how to search them effectively to find the best research and save time too! 

Click on the tabs above to learn how to use the following search techniques to expand or narrow your search in library databases, the library catalog, and Internet:

  • Keywords 
  • Phrase Searching
  • Truncation
  • Boolean

These tips are NOT REQUIRED to find sources, but will help you with effectively searching library resources and MORE!

Once you have a topic selected, pull out the key terms, do not type in the whole question. These are your keywords.

For example: 

Topic: Is popular culture too violent?

Keywords: popular, culture, violence

Use tools like these to help you:

Definition:

To focus your search, link terms that must appear together, in the order you place them (and spell them!). 

Quotation marks “ ” are often used to define a phrase.

Example:  “human rights”  “Golden West College” "distracted driving"

If you search distracted driving without quotes, you may retrieve resources unrelated to the concept of "distracted driving".

Helpful when searching for works of fiction, songs, or films with common words in them:

  • "because I could not stop for death" - a poem by Emily Dickinson
  • "once upon a time in the west" - film by director Sergio Leone

Definition:

Involves shortening a keyword to its root and adding a special character to allow for searching all variations:

  • The asterisk (*) is the most common symbol used in our library databases.

Example: commerc*  will find commerce commercial commercially 

Example: farm* will find farmer farms farming, as well as compound words such as farmhand or farmland

Note: This technique works in searching Google, among other search tools.

What is boolean?

Also called Boolean operators, these are words to connect your keywords and help pinpoint your search. These words are AND, OR, and NOT.

AND - by linking words with AND, you are telling the search engine that you want results that include all the keywords in a document.

Example: computers AND security will return results that contain both terms.

AND Two overlapping circles, one labeled A and the other B. Where they intersect is shaded in.

OR - by linking words with OR, you are requesting documents that include any of the keywords.

Example: travel OR tourism will return documents that contain one or both keywords.

OR Two overlapping circles, one labeled A and the other B. All areas are shaded in.

NOT- by linking words with NOT, you are specifying that you want documents that include the first term but not the second.

Example: Cherokee NOT jeep returns documents that contains the first term but not the second.

NOT Two overlapping circles, one labeled A and the other B. Only the part of circle B not in circle A is shaded in..

Video: Online Research: Tips for Effective Search Strategies

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