WRPR 160: Borders, Walls and Bridges (HC): Search Tips

Journal databases and library catalogs are content-rich and constructed for many different types of inquiries.  Use the searching strategies and techniques outlined below to capture relevant content.  This will produce more focused results than a simple keyword search.

In putting together search terms, think about the topic and how specific you want it to be. You will find often that there is more material than you expected and that you actually want to focus your search by adding a further concept.

You might be interested in finding out more about disability studies.  After browsing some books, you decide that prejudice and lack of understanding in regard to the disabled are issues you want to research.  From reading you find that these concepts are often described as ableism.

• Use AND to join two different concepts together, seeing only those results that discuss both ideas.      

• E.g., melville AND bartleby

• Use OR to include synonyms for relevant results. Group the synonyms within parentheses to be searched correctly.

• E.g., recluse OR hermit

• Combine OR and AND searches together: (recluse OR hermit) AND salinger

• Use truncation to get words with similar spellings in one search: politic* — searches for "politic," "politics," "political," and "politicize."
  

• For truncation within a word, use a question mark: wom?n — searches for "women," "woman," and "womyn"

• Put phrases in double quotation makrs for exact searches: "magic realism" — searches for those words together in that order

Too many results?  Change the search field to Abstract which summarizes the content or Subject for more focused results

When you find a journal article that interests you, look at the abstract and subject terms.