This page provides you with the foundational knowledge needed to search within article databases.
We cannot search the same way we pose a question in a search engine. Instead, we are pulling out key terms with Boolean operators and using advanced search strategies. Below you will find examples of how and when to use these strategies.
Using Boolean Logic (AND, OR, or NOT) can help you expand and limit your search results.
This will only produce results that contain both of these words. A simple search for fitness would produce results that contain contain both words contracting the search results.
This will produce results for both of these terms because they are related, and intimate and romantic efforts usually complement one another.
This will produce results for articles that discuss interpersonal information and do not contain any mention of friend. This could help you weed out unwanted results if you were looking for other mentions of interpersonal relationships.
Other search limiters (an asterisk, quotations, and parentheses), and how they can help you refine or expand your searches:
Asterisk * also referred to as truncation: Using an asterisk (*) produces all iterations of a word.
Example: child*
This will produce results for child, children, childhood, and childish.
Quotations ””: Using quotations will ensure that the words in the quotation marks come in that exact order in the results. These two words can have different meanings separately than together.
Example: “social media”
Parentheses (): Using parentheses allows you to use a combination of multiple Boolean operators and search limiters at once by making sure that what is inside the parentheses is one search criteria.
Example: speech AND (latino OR chicano OR hispanic)
This will produce results that contain the word and the exact phrase speech or results that contain the word speech and the terms that may be used interchangeable by authors.
Describes the important components of a research article.
Presented here are the first and last pages of a scholarly article. Click on the highlighted areas of the article to learn about clues to look for when identifying scholarly article.
