Search Strategies

Use search strategies to narrow, broaden, and/or produce more relevant results.
Example: You are looking for articles about **evangelism** or outreach to **children** in the **inner city** of **New York**.
Strategy	Search Examples
Basic Search	children and evangelism
Boolean: AND - use to search different concepts together OR - use to link similar terms; group with parenthesis NOT - use to specify a term you do not want in the search results	children AND evangelism (children OR child) AND (evangelism OR evangelize) (children OR child) AND (evangelism OR evangelize) NOT school
Truncation (): Searches the ROOT of a word ended with	child* AND evangel* NOT school = searches "child" or "children" AND "evangel," "evangelism," "evangelized," "evangelistic." etc; excludes results with "school"
Use fewer concepts: Increases number of results	child* AND evangel*
Use more concepts: Decreases number of results	child* AND (outreach OR evangel) AND inner AND city*
Phrase Search: Use quotation marks; Refines search	child* AND (outreach OR evangel*) AND “inner city” AND “New York”
Proximity Search: finds words that occur "near" or "within" a specified range of each other N - use when only word RANGE is important, W- use when word ORDER and RANGE are important	inner city N5 new york = searches "inner-city in New York" or "New York's inner city" inner city W5 new york = searches "inner-city in New York" but not "New York's inner city"
Limit/Expand: (Look for checkboxes on the database search screen.) Full text • peer reviewed • date • related terms • etc.