LibGuides: Math 247: Search strategies

Basic Keyword Searches

"recreational reading" AND stress
Use AND to connect words that must appear in a document. This *narrows* your search.
anxiety OR tension
Use OR if only one word must appear in a document. This *broadens* your search.
emoti*
Use an asterisk to truncate a word and allow for different endings, for example, emotion, emotional, emotive. (Be careful, though, because this can also include potentially non-related words like emoticon)
"bottled water"
Use quotation marks to enclose a phrase or words that must appear together in a document.
Pluto NOT planet
Use NOT to exclude words or terms from a search. (If you're looking for articles on board games or strategy games you don't want articles about the Olympic games.)

Searching strategies

There are slightly different strategies for different kinds of searches.

For a known item search (when you know the name(s) of the author(s) and/or the title of the work you want) here are a couple of ways to search efficiently in Sherlock. If you are looking for an article, use the Articles scope.

Put the title into quotation marks (phrase searching). This often gives you good results, with the title you're looking for in the top 10 results. If you don't find the result you're looking for in Sherlock, you can try in Google Scholar; occasionally it will be there. You do have to be careful to give the title exactly.
If the title is pretty generic and you're getting lots of results, try either adding the author's name to the search box (but not in quotation marks with the title!) or try an advanced search to look for both title and author.

For a topic or subject search (where you know what kind of information you want, but not who wrote about it), decide on some keywords and search with them. You might need to try a few different ways to word things, or some of the search term combinations explained in the Basic Keyword Searches box. Sometimes it is more helpful to search in a specific database (like the Social Science Premium Collection, or PubMed) than in Sherlock or Google Scholar.