Quick Tips for Searching

Quick Tips.....for internet searching or the library database searching.

Help screens are often difficult to find and even harder to understand for most databases these days.

However, there are a few hints to help you get started with most databases and search engines.

1. Use the "keyword" option when available.


2. Connect keywords with [AND] [OR] or eliminate unwanted terms using [NOT]. For example, if I want to know, why the sky is blue, my search phrase could be [sky AND blue].
   
   
3. Use quotation marks to search for specific phrases such as "irregular warfare".



4. Truncation symbols are *, ?, !, #, $. The most common being the * character. For example, if I want to search for how many men cook, I would use the search phrase men AND cook*. The * character can take the place of on letter or many letters. For example the search phrase cook* would find the words cooks, cooking, cooker. cookware, cooked, cookies or cookable.



5. Stopwords are bad so do not use in, a, the, an in your search phrase.



6. Field searching means selecting the keywords in the "Title field", or "subject field" , or "author field" or something like it. These options are usually available through the "advanced searching" link or tab.

	Marthea Turnage mturnage@sfasu.edu rm. 202c 936.468.1896 Subjects - Accounting, Criminal Justice, Economics and Finance, General Business, Law, Management/Marketing/International Business, Nursing, Psychology