Research Tips and Tricks

Use multiple key terms to focus the search and avoid "noise" that distracts from materials relevant to your topic. A search for "baking shows" in JSTOR provides 29,080 results, while searching for "baking shows" and "cookbooks" only has 697 results. Adding the second key term limits the search to resources that look at both topics at once. However, "and" is not the only word used to link key terms.

Terms called “Boolean operators” can combine search terms and allow you to narrow or widen your search. These words, “and,” “or,” and “not” tell a search engine how to look for your key terms in relation to each other.

And: narrowest 

• “And” tells a search engine that I’m looking for term A and term B in conjunction with each other. I only want sources that mention both A and B.

Or: widest

• “Or” tells a search engine I’d like to find sources mentioning term A, term B, or terms A and B in the same source.

Not: in the middle

• “Not” indicates that I’m seeking sources that only discuss one of my terms while excluding the other. I only want sources about term A, not sources that also discuss term B.

Example search within JSTOR:

• baking shows AND cookbooks
  • 697 results
• baking shows OR cookbooks
  • 34,135 results
• baking shows NOT cookbooks
  • 28,383 results