#SearchSmart! Information Literacy Tutorial

To retrieve the broadest set of search results, you may include several variations of your search terms using the "nesting" approach. Nesting uses brackets / parentheses ( ) to keep concepts that are alike together, and to tell the database to look for search terms in the brackets first.

Pro Tip: Never mix Boolean Operators without using brackets ( ):

• Grouping search terms within brackets allows you to force the ordering of Boolean Operators.
• Without brackets, a search of cats OR kittens AND dogs OR puppies would process kittens AND dogs first instead of cats OR dogs.

Phrase searching narrows your search results by allowing you to define precisely how you want the words to appear. For example, if you are searching for information on job satisfaction then you are probably looking for those two words to appear right next to each other, with no other words in between, in the text of the document. To make sure that the database searches this correctly, put quotation marks around your search term and force the database to search this as a phrase, i.e. "job satisfaction".

Pro Tip: Be careful when you use phrase searching; if you put too many words in quotations the database will most likely not find any results. You want to only use phrase searching on established phrases - words that you can reasonably expect other authors used.

Truncation lets you search for a word that could have multiple endings. The symbol for truncation is usually an * at the point where the spelling of the word could change. For example, children AND music* would find articles with the terms children and music/musical/musician/musicians/musicality in them.

Pro Tip: Truncation is very useful when you know one of your search terms has several endings, but all of the variations represent basically the same idea. Using truncation will help you complete your search faster because you will not have to manually type in and search every variation of the word.

Use wildcards symbols in searches to account for alternate spellings.

• ? stands for one additional character, but not for zero characters. For example, wom?n will return results for women or woman.
• # stands for zero or one character. For example, colo#r will return results for color or colour.

Pro Tip: Use wildcards only where necessary. While wildcards allow for greater flexibility by matching various word forms and variations, they can also generate a large number of irrelevant results if used too broadly.

Proximity is when the caret symbol followed by a number requires the two terms joined by it to be within a certain number of words of each other. For example, in a search for ("mental health"^5) the number is 5, which means that the terms "mental" and "health" must appear within five words of each other in the search results.

Pro Tip: A smaller number restricts the proximity range and provides more precise results, while a larger number expands the range and retrieves more comprehensive results.