Initial Reading for Research:
Truncation or wildcard symbols can broaden your search and allow you to look for variations of words.
Truncation
Example: educat* will retrieve educate, educating, educational, education, educator, educators
Wildcards
Example: wom#n will retrieve woman and women
In phrase searching, a group of two or more words are used as a unit and enclosed in quotation marks.
Example: "secondary school students"
Boolean operators
AND
The AND operator narrows a search by requesting that each term appears in each retrieved record. Use AND when you want to combine multiple concepts in one search. The more terms entered, the narrower the search.
Example: assisted AND denominational AND secondary AND schools
OR
The OR operator broadens your search by requesting that either one or both of your search terms appear in the retrieved record. Use OR when you want to broaden your search with related terms, synonyms, and variant spelling.
Example: college OR university OR higher education OR tertiary institution
NOT
The NOT operator restricts your search by excluding records that contain a specific term.
Example: learning disability NOT dyslexia
If your initial search query does not produce the desired results, try these search strategies.
Search Strategies | Examples |
Queries are not case sensitive. |
Lloyd Best and lloyd best will retrieve the same results.
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Results will typically include each word or punctuation mark included in the search query. Some stop words or exceptions apply. |
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Keep search queries simple and descriptive and use as few terms as possible. Avoid natural language queries as they can limit your results. |
Use educational technology instead of the use of information and communication technology in education. |
Google automatically truncates search terms. To prevent automatic truncation, use a + sign in front of each term. |
A query on child retrives results with "children" and "childcare." |
Use double quotations marks ("") to search terms as a phrase and narrow your results. Google will only retrieve results that have those exact terms in the exact order typed. |
A query on Arthur Napoleon Raymond Robinson will retrieve only those sites that refer to Mr. Robinson by his full name. Sites that refer to him as simply "ANR Robinson" may be overlooked. |
Use the site: feature to limit your results to a specific website or class of websites. |
The query "school violence" site:.edu will only retrieve articles about school violence from academic sites in the edu domain. |
To allow for either of several words to appear in your results, use the OR operator. The operator must be in all caps. |
A query on secondary OR high OR middle schools will retrieve any or all of the types of schools mentioned. |