Remember: The most efficient way to search will often involve multiple keywords (also known as a 'search query')
Example: You’re writing a paper about the portrayal of women’s body image in media.
Try:
women AND images AND media
or
body AND image AND women AND media
You’re seldom going to get the perfect set of results from the first search you run.
If you have chosen a paper topic but are getting many results and are not sure which ones to use – your topic may be too broad – you may need to narrow your topic, make it more specific, before you really can get started finding resources for your paper.
You can limit your search results! You can limit by:
These limiters tend to be available to the left of your search results.
Most of our databases by default search for your keyword(s) in the entire text - the whole document.
Try Field Searching
Try Subject searching
In the example below, the database uses the subject term peer teaching to organize articles on that topic rather than peer tutoring.
Try Phrase Searching
Try Truncation
Example: Instead of searching for:
women AND images AND media
try:
wom* AND image* AND media
This will retrieve results containing:
women, woman, women’s, woman’s, as well as:image, images
Add synonyms to your search query
Example: Instead of searching for:
women AND images AND media
try
(women OR females) AND images AND media
If you forget to put the parentheses around your synonyms when using OR, this will not work well, and you will end up with extra, non-relevant results – talk to one of the Reference Librarians if you have any concerns about doing this search technique correctly.