Advanced searching is just three small habits: join words with AND / OR / NOT, wrap exact phrases in “quotation marks”, and use truncation (the * symbol) to catch word endings. Together they turn a vague search into a sharp one.

Most people type a few words, get 40,000 results, sigh, and click the first thing. The fix isn’t more words — it’s better-connected words. These tricks are the same in almost every database, so learning them once pays off everywhere.

The three moves that do the heavy lifting

  • AND narrows: malaria AND children — only results with both.
  • OR widens: maize OR corn — catches either word for the same thing.
  • NOT excludes: jaguar NOT car — the animal, not the vehicle.
  • “exact phrase” keeps words together: “climate change”, not climate and change scattered apart.
  • Truncat* catches endings: educat* finds educate, education, educational, educator.
Build a search, step by step
Topic: the effect of social media on teenage mental health.
Start broad: social media AND teenagers. Too much? Add a concept: AND (“mental health” OR anxiety). Catch word endings: teenager*. Final query: “social media” AND teenager* AND (“mental health” OR anxiety) — precise, and it took thirty seconds.

Then let the filters finish the job

Once results appear, the sidebar filters (date, peer-reviewed, full-text, subject) do the last bit of tidying. A good search plus two filter clicks beats endless scrolling every time.

Try this
Take a search you ran recently and rebuild it with one AND, one OR, and one phrase in quotes. Compare the result count before and after. That gap is the skill paying off.

🔗 A friendly free guide: Purdue OWL — Conducting Research

Now you can find good material quickly. The next problem is a happy one: what do you do with all of it? On to Managing Digital Resources.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Modifié le: vendredi 5 juin 2026, 07:26