1. A UST Libraries Information Literacy Tutorial

2. Database Search Techniques
Dissatisfied with your database search results? Don’t
know what all those checkboxes are for? Think
Boolean is a form of lawn bowling?
This tutorial shows you how to take advantage of our
databases’ special features and search functions to get
the best possible search results.

3. Database Search Techniques
Outline:
1. Limiters
2. Narrow with AND
3. Broaden with OR
4. Use subject terms

4. 1. Limiters
Limiters exclude all search results that don’t fit your
chosen criteria. Limiters can take a lot of the work out
of finding the exact resources you want.
For example, if you select the limit, “peer-reviewed
journals,” then you will have only articles from
scholarly journals in your search results.

6. 1. Limiters
Different databases offer different limits. These might
include date, geography, subject area, or resource type.
Read the whole Advanced Search page and the left side
of your search results page to see what limits are
available to you.

7. 2. Narrow with AND
You can narrow your database search results by adding
key terms using AND.
For example, a search for viruses AND computers will get
fewer (and very different) results than a search for just
viruses. All your results will contain both words, so
they are more likely to be about computer viruses.
On the next slide, we’ll show a screenshot demonstrating
a search with AND.

8. Search: university AND Thomas AND Texas

9. 3. Broaden with OR
You can increase your relevant search results by adding
alternative keywords with OR.
With OR, you can add synonyms or related terms to your
search. These will catch results that may be on your
subject, but that use different wording.

10. 3. Broaden with OR
You can combine AND searches with OR searches using
parentheses or the multiple boxes on database search
pages. For example:
(fruits OR vegetables) AND (farms OR orchards)
The next slide gives a database screenshot example.

11. Search: (fruits OR vegetables) AND (orchards OR farms)

12. 3. Broaden with OR
A good, easy way to broaden your searches is to use
truncation.
With truncation, you can search for different forms of a
word. For example,
Catholic*
searches for:
Catholic OR Catholics OR Catholicism

13. 4. Use Subject Terms
Databases use subject terms to organize resources by
topic.
Articles get assigned subject terms by professional
subject indexers working for the database. The terms
are listed and explained in the database Thesaurus.

14. 4. Use Subject Terms
A search for a subject term should get all the database’s
articles on that topic– even if the article uses different
words for the same idea.
For example, “cell phones” is a subject term in the
database, Academic Search Complete. For that reason,
a search for “cell phones” gets thousands more results
than a search for “mobile phones.” And all articles
about “mobile phones” will be included in the “cell
phones” search.
Always write down relevant subject terms and use them
in your database searches.