As most of your searching will be done digitally, it's important to keep the following tips and tricks to make your searching more effective.
Remember.
Most search engines and databases will let you narrow your results by year published, type of source, full text, or scholarly/peer-reviewed. They also allow you to use a variety of search techniques to help you narrow or broaden your search results.
AND
-Used to narrow results with multiple search terms.
Example: global warming AND polar bears
OR
-Used to increase results. Helpful for synonyms.
Example: global warming or climate change
NOT
- Helps exclude unwanted results.
Example: global warming NOT polar bears
Note. Image from “Boolean Pizza” by Andrea Bearman, 2022 under CC-BY 4.0.
Example
Type pollut* to find pollute, pollution, polluting, etc.
Benefits
Improve search results by ensuring you don't overlook sources due to slight variations in terminology or spelling.
Save time by not having to do multiple searches.
Broadens your search results.
Wildcard is useful for searching for irregular plurals or spelling variations. To use this search strategy, place an asterisk (*) where needed.
Example
WOM*N to find results including woman or women; COLO*R to find color or colour.
It is useful for when you want to narrow down search results to include only those that contain an exact phrase, and not each individual word separately. Simply input your phrase in quotation marks to search for that exact phrase.
Example
"global warming"