You can place quotation marks around two or more words you want to search as an exact phrase. Use a phrase search when looking for a particular organization or a phrase that you think would appear in a relevant website or database, such as "American Heart Association" or "gardening tips."
You can also put quotation marks around a book title, like "Catcher in the Rye," to search for these four words as a unified phrase that includes the stop words in and the. Library databases often ignore stop words not found within quotations.
Note: Not all databases respond to phrase searching.
Boolean searching involves combining your search terms with "operators" such as AND, OR, and NOT.
When you combine search terms with AND, you will retrieve only results that include both of your terms.
When you combine search terms with OR, you will retrieve only results that have either one or the other term, but not necessarily both terms.
Using NOT will exclude results with that term.
Some databases, like EBSCO, have built-in drop down menus to add Boolean operators:
Truncation allows you to retrieve results containing variations of a search term.
To conduct a truncated search, enter the stem of a term followed by an asterisk (*).
For example, entering educat* will yield results that include the terms educate, education, educator, and educational, along with other variations.
