Advanced Search Techniques

These are some additional tips that can save you time and give you better results.

Wildcards

Try using wildcards or truncation to search on multiple forms of a word. Many databases support using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard character.

For example, if you type farm plus an asterisk (*), it will search the following: farm, farms, farmer, farming, etc.

Boolean

Use Boolean operators to broaden or narrow your search. You can combine search terms with operators AND, OR & NOT to combine terms in different ways.

Boolean animation

It's counter-intuitive, but using AND will narrow your search. Both terms must appear for the article to be retrieved.

Using OR will broaden your search: Articles containing either term will be retrieved.

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