How to Expand or Narrow Search Results: Research Tips

Exact Words and Phrases

If you have a specific phrase, name or term that you are searching for, put it in quotation marks. Otherwise, you will get results for the words separately, which may not give you relevant results.

Examples:

"James Baldwin"
"Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe"
"Ulysses S. Grant"
"shock and awe"
"adult education"

Boolean Indicators

Combine or eliminate search terms using AND, OR, and NOT.

• AND
  Use AND to combine terms you want to search. Your results will include both terms.
• OR
  Use OR if there is more than one term that may work and you want results for either of them.
• NOT
  Use NOT if there's a term you don't want the search to include. Be careful: this eliminates everything with the word you exclude.

Wildcard 

If you have a keyword with multiple relevant suffixes, use a wildcard symbol (* or ?) after the prefix to search for all of the options. You can also use this to replace only one letter in a search term.

Examples:

C*O
gives results for
CFO, CEO, CTO, etc.

auto? or auto*
gives results for
automatic, automobile, autobahn, etc.

Number and Date Ranges

Ranges can be specified by putting two periods between the numbers (include the unit of measure if relevant).

Examples:

1'..4'
"Chevy Camaro" 1967..1969
$20.00..$45.00
1852..1889

Parentheses

Use parentheses to separate search strings and terms.

It works like a math problem, everything in the parentheses is separated from the rest of the terms and those processes come before anything outside of the parentheses.

Examples:

("biological anthropology" OR "physical anthropology) AND forensics
gives results for
biological anthropology and forensics
and
physical anthropology and forensics

autism AND ("GMO" OR "genetically modified organism") NOT corn
gives results for
autism and GMO excluding corn
and
autism and genetically modified organism excluding corn