How to get the most out of Online Databases and Internet ?

• Search terms containing more than one wordEnclosing them in quotation marks, returns documents containing the exact phrase only.

• An example: Searching for information on gun control legislation, using "gun control" eliminates documents that contain the words gun and control, but not in that order; possibly in entirely different paragraphs and maybe not even relating to the topic of gun control

• You want to broaden your search? Use a root part of the word and abbreviate it with an asterisk (garden*).

• The engine will return links to documents containing gardens, garden, gardener, gardeners, and so on.

• You can combine truncated terms with other words using Boolean Operators.

Example: employ* AND education will retrieve records which include the various forms of employ and the word education.

• Boolean operators provide you with powerful control over search engine logic.

• AND, OR, NOT (or AND NOT in some engines)

• use the capitalized word AND between keywords. The engine will only find documents that have both words.

• Example – Search Food AND Nutrition would return all documents that contain both words.

• Capitalize all letters in the word AND, otherwise the search engine will treat it as a keyword, not as an operator.

Food Nutrition

• If you want to broaden your search.

• This is very useful when searching for terms that have synonyms.

• An example is children OR kids

ChildrenChildren KidsKids

• NOT is used to exclude a particular word or combination of words from your search results.

• If you are retrieving many records that are unrelated to your topic, try using the NOT operator to eliminate a word.

ChocolateChocolate CakeCake

• A "wild card" takes the place of letters within a word and is an important way of catching variant spellings.

• For example, the American spelling is color, the British spelling is colour. To retrieve both spellings, you might search for col*r.

• Use parentheses to clarify relationships between search terms.

• Example: (television or mass media) and women

• This search looks for both "television and women" and "mass media and women."

• Stop words are commonly used words that will automatically stop a computer keyword search because they occur too frequently in records. Stop words are usually listed in the help screens of whatever database you are using. Some stop words are: the, an, at, for, from, then. When constructing a keyword search, choose the most important words.

• Example: If you want to find information about "What are the effects of Global Warming on agriculture?"

Your keywords are: global warming, effects, agriculture. The words what, is, of, the, are not descriptive of your topic.