This section describes some important methods you can use to search efficiently and effectively. It gives you guidance on:
Although databases are developing to automatically search for variant spellings, they might just search for the exact letters you type in. To ensure you don't miss something relevant use wildcard and truncation symbols to include spelling variations to widen your search.
A truncation symbol (*) retrieves any number of letters - useful to find different word endings based on the root of a word
africa* will find africa, african, africans, africaans
agricultur* will find agriculture, agricultural, agriculturalist
A wildcard symbol (?) replaces a single letter. It's useful for retrieving alternate spelling spellings (i.e. British vs. American English) and simple plurals
wom?n will find woman or women
behavio?r will find behaviour or behavior
Hint: Not all databases use the ? and * symbols, so check the online help screens before you start.
Watch our video on literature searching tips and tricks
Jump to 01:45 for truncation and 05:46 for wildcards.
Search operators (also called Boolean operators) allow you to include multiple words and concepts in your searches. This means you can search for all of your terms at once rather than carrying out multiple searches for each concept.
There are three main operators:
Watch our video on literature searching tips and tricks
This video covers a variety of techniques for creating a comprehensive search including using 'AND' and 'OR' to build a search statement.
Using OR will bring you back records containing either of your search terms. It will return items that include both terms, but will also return items that contain only one of the terms.
This will give you a broader range of results.
OR can be used to link together synonyms. These are then placed in brackets to show that they are all the same concept.
women AND AfricaUsing AND will find items that contain both of your search terms, giving you a more specific set of results.
If you're getting too many results, using AND can be a good way to narrow your search.
women NOT AfricaUsing NOT will find articles containing a particular term, but will exclude articles containing your second term.
Use this with caution - by excluding results you might miss out on key resources.
Sometimes your search may contain common words (i.e. development, communication) which will retrieve too many irrelevant records, even when using an AND search. On many databases, including Google, to look for a specific phrase, use inverted commas:
Your search will only bring back items containing these exact phrases.
Some databases automatically perform a phrase search if you do not use any search operators. For example, "agriculture africa" is not a phrase used in English so you may not find any items on the subject. Use AND in between your search words to avoid this.
On Scopus to search for an exact phrase use { } e.g. {agricultural development}. Using quotes on Scopus will find your words in the same field (e.g. title) but not necessarily next to one another.
Some databases use proximity operators, which are a more advanced search function. You can use these to tell the database how close one word must be to another and, in some cases, in what order. This makes a search more specific and excludes irrelevant records.
For instance, if you were searching for references about women in Africa, you might retrieve irrelevant records for items about women published in Africa. Performing a proximity search will only retrieve the two words in the same sentence, making your search more accurate.
Each database has its own way of proximity searching, so it's important to check the online help before you start. Here are some examples of the variety of possible searches:
On most databases you can type in a search statement (or search string), which involves combining your search words using search operators. When creating a search statement you must use brackets to ensure correct processing of the search. The database will read your search from left to right, but will perform bracketed terms first (the same way bracketed terms are dealt with first in mathematics).
This is an example search statement bringing together our three concepts using the techniques described above. Each concept is separated by AND.
(wom?n OR gender) AND "agricultural development" AND africa*
Try using the generator below to come up with your own search statement.
Many databases also allow you to create rows for each concept, the database takes care of the brackets and inserts AND between the rows.