Searching for Articles

If you are finding too much or not enough information, use keywords that are narrower, broader, or similar to the keywords you've already used to vary your results. You could also use boolean operators and/or truncation symbols.

You can combine keywords, boolean operators, and truncation symbols in a search to create a search string to retrieve the most relevant search results

When you create a search string, there are things to remember:

• Always use parentheses around your search words to "preserve the logic" of your string. 

Example: (Jelly OR Jam) AND peanut butter =/= Jelly OR (Jam AND peanut butter).

• Always keep your OR statements in one line and use parentheses--this prevents issues of the default process order of AND, OR, and NOT in various databases
• Using quotation marks around phrases will look for EXACT matches, ONLY.      

Example: "bed bugs" will not find "bed bug".  Instead search for bed AND bug*, without the quotes, to get both variations.