Adapting your search to get better results
Watch the following short video to learn how to search more effectively:
Boolean searching
Boolean operators enable you to link concepts together in your search, or to distinguish them from each other. The main operators are AND, OR and NOT:.
- AND - will narrow your search to results that include both terms
- OR - will broaden your search to results that include either term
- NOT - will exclude terms from your results
Truncation and Wildcards
- Truncation uses an asterisk (*) to tell a database you want all variations of a particular word-stem.
- Searching for music* will return results for music, musician, musicians, musical, musicals, musicality, etc.
- The asterisk can be placed anywhere within the word to denote the word-stem. Other examples could be
- creat* (create/creativity/creation/creative/creator)
- perform* (perform/performer/performance/performative)
- identi* (identity/identify/identification)
- therap* (therapy/therapies/therapist)
- Wildcards often use a question mark (?) to search for alternative spellings.
- Examples include
Phrase Searching
- Many databases and library catalogues will search for exact phrases if they are put inside quotation marks ("...").
- Phrase searching is effective because it will only return results where the exact phrase is included.
- Phrases could be
- Names ("John Hughes"; "Johann Sebastian Bach"; "Jason Robert Brown")
- Titles of works ("The Lord of the Rings"; "New World Symphony"; "Fun Home")
- Concepts or expressions particular to your discipline ("research methods"; "music therapy"; "queer dramaturgy")
The images below illustrate how this is effective using "research methods" as a phrase - note the number of results in the bottom left corner:
Searching without quotation marks:
Searching with quotation marks: