Created by Ronnie Bradley, Library Information Specialist
Published on September 11, 2020
Conducting an effective search is important to finding relevant articles and resources on your topic of interest. This video tutorial will give you tips on how to broaden your search and help you to find new keywords for your topic and more relevant results.
1. Use the Boolean OR function to broaden a search.
Use the search box where you had your term. You can use singular/plural (woman or women), alternate spellings (theater or theatre), or similar terms (universities or colleges) to broaden your search.
To do this, put both terms in the first box, separated by the word ‘or’. In some databases you may need to put parentheses around the search terms. You can be prepared to use any database if you remember to use the parentheses when using the ‘or’ Boolean function.
2. The second way to broaden a search is truncation. This is when you use the stem of a word (like theat for theater) and use the truncation symbol (*) to get every form of the word that follows the truncation symbol.
Truncation symbols differ from database to database, so you will need to look at the database’s help function to determine the correct symbol to use for the truncation function.
