I want to expand my results; I'm not getting enough information.
- Add the OR operator between your keywords. This is helpful when one concept might be called by multiple different terms in the scholarship, such as how the Middle Ages have also been called the Dark Ages or the Medieval era.
- Example: agriculture OR farming. This asks the database to bring back any articles that contain EITHER the word agriculture OR the word farming. I don't want to miss out on a useful article because the author used the term agriculture, but I only used the word farming in my search!
- Use truncation. Truncation expands your keyword to include all variants of the word.
- Example: politic* finds articles containing politics, political, politician, politicians. farm* finds articles containing farm, farmer, farmers, farming, farmland.
I want to narrow my results; I'm getting too much information or I'm getting irrelevant information.
- Use phrase searching. Phrase searching finds articles where the exact phrase you search appears.
- Example: "food security" brings back articles containing the phrase "food security" and ignores articles where the word "food" appears in one paragraph and the word "security" appears separately somewhere else. But be careful--the databases are searching for an exact match to the term you put in quotations, so in this case, the database would ignore articles only containing the phrase "food insecurity."
- Add the AND operator between your keywords. This tells the database that BOTH of your keywords MUST appear somewhere in the article. Unlike with phrase searching, they do not need to be next to each other.
- Example: agriculture AND biodiversity
