Research Tips and Tricks

Nesting phrases

Use parentheses when using multiple Boolean operators in one search. Much like quotation marks link two words, parentheses link two search terms with one Boolean operator. If I’m looking for term A or term B in conjunction with term C, I need to use parentheses. This often comes into play when searching with synonyms of key terms.

My earlier key term list included “baking show” and the word “cookbook" as well as the words “sale” and “production.” If I’m interested in both the sale and production of cookbooks, my search will look like this:

• (sale OR production) AND cookbook

The word ending wildcard

An asterisk indicates that a word has multiple endings, and you'd like to search for all forms of the word. A common example is "child." Forms include "children," "childish," "childlike," "childhood," and many more. If I search for "child*", the search engine will give me results for all forms of the word, not just "child."

Academic Search Premier Results:

• child AND dog
  • 7,049 results 
• child* AND dog
  • 7,794 results

An asterisk allows for searching both the singular and the plural forms of “baking show” at the same time.

JSTOR Results:

• baking show
  • 36,251 results
• baking show*
  • 43,764 results