English 1213: Composition II: Finding

Search Tips:

• Spelling matters. If you find no (or few) matches to a keyword search, double check spelling.
• If you find too many results, enter more keywords to be more specific.
• If you find no results, remove some keywords (you're being too specific), or broaden the search.
• When searching for titles, ignore A, An, and The when they start the title.

Combine terms with AND

For example: college students AND study habits (note that in this example we limited the search to books, not articles or other resources, published since 1980)

Use OR to broaden the search

For example: (smoking OR tobacco) AND health (note that in this example we limited the search to books, not articles or other resources, published since 1980)

Truncation - the addition of a symbol (usually an asterisk *) at the beginning or end of a word stem in a keyword search to retrieve variants containing the root. For example, truncation is particularly useful in retrieving singular and plural versions of words.

Example: librar* would find library, libraries, librarian, librariana, librarianship, etc.

Visit our tutorials page to find tips and tricks for every part of your research process.