A search for Boys AND China will give you results containing BOTH words.
Use AND to narrow or focus your results.
A search for heart OR cardio* will give you results containing EITHER word.
Use OR for synonyms or closely related words.
(Migration OR Mobil*) AND ("Urban sprawl" OR Surburb* OR Urbanization)
...will give you articles/books on migration of people in relation to urban sprawl.
Records in library databases are comprised of fields containing specific pieces of bibliographic information. Common fields include: author, title, journal title, abstract, date/year of publication, subject/descriptor, etc.
Limiting your search to specific database fields can yield more precise results.
MERLIN and many other databases use the * symbol to indicate truncation.
Encroach* will search for:
