Seven Critical Steps to Getting Better Search Results

1. Reduce your research question or topic to its basic keywords and phrases.

• Question: Does the death penalty violate the U.S. Constitution?
• Keywords/Phrases: Death penalty, United States, Constitution

2. Wherever possible, search phrases within quotation marks.

• Example: “death penalty”

3. Think of additional terms that may be similar to the terms you chose and link them together using the Boolean operator OR.

• Example: “death penalty” OR “capital punishment”
• Example: U.S. OR “United States”

4. Combine your basic keywords and phrases using other appropriate Boolean operators – AND and NOT.

• Example: poverty AND crime
• Example: poverty NOT crime

5. Use truncation (wildcard characters) to expand on root words.

• Example: violat* will retrieve any word that begins with that root such as violate, violates, violated, violation, etc.

6. Use any filters or limiters available to you to further target your search.

• Examples: date, document type, fiction/non-fiction, juvenile/not juvenile, language, etc.

7. Aim to search by subject rather than keyword or any field.

• Warning: The terms you search may turn out to be different than the subject terms used by the system. For example, you may enter “death penalty” as subject but the system uses “capital punishment” as its official subject heading (i.e. controlled vocabulary).

originally created by Tim Hartnett, SUNY Plattsburgh

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.