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Search Strategies: More about Advanced Searches

Tips for using advanced search strategies in library databases

Advanced Searches

If you want to use the simple/basic search option in the database to find articles on teenagers and video games, but not articles that talk about violence, you might enter a search like this into the search box:

(teen* OR adolescent OR "young adult") AND "video games" NOT violence

Notice that synonyms and related terms are grouped together using parentheses, with OR between each search term.

If you want to use the advanced search option in the database to conduct the same search, you might put (teen* OR adolescent OR "young adult") into the first search box, "video games" into the second, and violence into the third. There are dropdowns next to the second and third search boxes if you want to combine terms using something other than AND. In our example, we would want to change the dropdown before the word violence to NOT