2. How to get the most out of
Online Databases and
Internet ?

4. • Search terms containing more than one word
Enclosing them in quotation marks, returns documents
containing the exact phrase only.
• An example: Searching for information on gun control
legislation, using "gun control" eliminates documents that
contain the words gun and control, but not in that order;
possibly in entirely different paragraphs and maybe not even
relating to the topic of gun control

5. • You want to broaden your search?
Use a root part of the word and abbreviate it
with an asterisk (garden*).
• The engine will return links to documents
containing gardens, garden, gardener,
gardeners, and so on.

6. • You can combine truncated terms with other
words using Boolean Operators.
Example: employ* AND education
will retrieve records which include the various
forms of employ and the word education.

7. • Boolean operators provide you with powerful
control over search engine logic.
• AND, OR, NOT (or AND NOT in some engines)

9. • use the capitalized word AND between keywords.
The engine will only find documents that have both
words.
• Example – Search Food AND Nutrition would return
all documents that contain both words.
• Capitalize all letters in the word AND, otherwise the
search engine will treat it as a keyword, not as an
operator.

10. Food Nutrition

11. • If you want to broaden your search.
• This is very useful when searching for terms
that have synonyms.
• An example is children OR kids

12. Children Kids

13. • NOT is used to exclude a particular word or
combination of words from your search
results.
• If you are retrieving many records that are
unrelated to your topic, try using the NOT
operator to eliminate a word.

14. Chocolate Cake

15. • A "wild card" takes the place of letters within
a word and is an important way of catching
variant spellings.
• For example, the American spelling is color,
the British spelling is colour. To retrieve both
spellings, you might search for col*r.

16. • Use parentheses to clarify relationships
between search terms.
• Example: (television or mass media) and
women
• This search looks for both "television and
women" and "mass media and women."

17. • Stop words are commonly used words that will automatically
stop a computer keyword search because they occur too
frequently in records. Stop words are usually listed in the help
screens of whatever database you are using. Some stop
words are: the, an, at, for, from, then. When constructing a
keyword search, choose the most important words.
• Example: If you want to find information about "What are the
effects of Global Warming on agriculture?"
Your keywords are: global warming, effects, agriculture. The
words what, is, of, the, are not descriptive of your topic.