Keywords
The databases are not designed to search like Google for a natural language question such as:
What was the 2014 GDP of Chile?
Instead, the databases instead rely on the use of keywords. A good search for the question above would be:
Chile AND GDP AND 2014
“Quotation Marks”
Placing quotation marks around your search phrase is helpful because doing so will limit results to only items that contain those words in that exact order. This will increase the accuracy of your returned results.
For example, a search for the phrase Social Work will search for the word Social or the word Work, and results will include resources that mention both or either word, regardless of the order in which they appear or their relationship to one another. Searching for "Social Work" within quotation marks will make your search more specific and bring you more relevant results.
Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT
Database search fields recognize AND, OR, and NOT as Boolean operations when they are typed in ALL CAPS in the search box.
Using AND allows terms to be linked together to narrow and focus your search. For example, you could try the following search:
veterans AND “social work”
Using OR expands your search and is useful when there is more than one commonly used term or phrase for your topic. For example, you could search:
“social work” OR “social welfare” OR "social services"
To exclude items in search, you can use the NOT operator to focus your search. For example, you might want to search:
animal NOT dog
birds NOT penguins