Research Tips and Tricks

A set of quotation marks around a search term/key term indicates that you want those exact words in that exact order. That is, when entering "baking show," I am not searching for "baking" and "show," but I am searching for "baking show." 

JSTOR Results:

• baking show
  • 36,251 results
• "baking show"
  • 61 results

Not only is 61 a more reasonable number of results to sift through than 36,251, but the results will also be more relevant to my topic.

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

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

Search strings can get long and a little messy. If I’m looking for my three primary key terms and their synonyms in one search, I need to remember all three types of punctuation and all three connecting words. My search can get as complicated as:

• “baking show*” AND (sale OR production) AND cookbook*

That’s a lot, but it is a search option. I might look at this search in chunks, though, not all at once.