Effectively navigating library databases and web-based tools demands a skillful search strategy involving:
While there is not one right way to do a search, the strategies identified on the tabs above will improve your results. Remember searching for quality, scholarly information demands skill, practice, and a good deal of patience!
Keywords are search terms that express the core of your topic. They are essential for a successful search, particularly within library catalogs, article databases (GALILEO), and even search engines. (Never use sentence structure, such as your research question or thesis statement!) Effective keywords help you retrieve accurate and relevant resources.
Once you've got your main search keywords, be sure to brainstorm related terms or synonyms. Good keywords broaden your search by including different terms related to your topic, making it more effective.
TIP: Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and subject headings to help you formulate these other keywords.
Quotation marks can be used to identify phrases. By using quotations marks, you are telling the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.
“Friends of Irish Freedom”
Instead of
Friends AND Irish AND Freedom
“Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act”
Instead of
Pendleton AND Civil AND Service AND reform AND Act
Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms from your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses 3 terms (AND, OR, and NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms.
| Operator | What it Does | How to Use It |
| AND | Find items that use BOTH keywords | Family AND Industrialization |
| OR | Find items that use EITHER of the keywords | Marriage OR Matrimonial |
| NOT | EXCLUDES items that use the keyword | Religion NOT Catholic |
Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternate endings. The character (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.
Archiv* retrieves
Archival, Archive, Archives, Archivist, Archivists
Cultur* retrieves
Culture, Cultural, Culturally
Nesting uses parentheses ( ) to keep concepts that are alike together, and to tell the database to look for search terms in the parentheses first. Nesting also uses the Boolean operator OR to connect like terms and the Boolean operator AND to connect the like terms to the rest of the search.
Labor AND (Britain OR England) AND 19th century
Most reference resources are considered "tertiary" source materials. These books and websites provide background information and an overview and analysis of a subject or concept. Tertiary sources have been compiled from secondary sources. Unlike a secondary sourcebook or journal article, tertiary sources are not intended to be read in their entirety. Instead, they are most often used to clarify terms and concepts about a particular topic. Tertiary sources include:
Subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries are more specialized than general ones. Coverage is limited to a specific subject or field of study and contain more developed entries written by scholars and experts within the field. Click on the book cover below to explore more.