Communication 485: Research Methods

Use the following tips and strategies to search for information more effectively in the library's resources and elsewhere. 

• Use AND between search terms to narrow your results. For example, searching "communicative competence" AND children means you want articles that discuss both topics. You will get fewer results when you use AND. 
• Use OR between search terms to expand your results. For example, searching children OR youth means you want articles discussing either of your search terms. You will get more results when you use OR. 
• Put quotation marks around phrases. This means you want articles that contain those words next to one another as a phrase. Searching "communicative competence" using quotation marks will find articles with those words in that exact order in the text of the source. You will get fewer results when you use quotation marks to find an exact phrase. 
• Use an asterisk (*) when you would like to search for multiple variations of a word. For example, if you search communicat*, you will see results for communication, communicate, communicative, etc. Place the asterisk where the ending of the word changes. This is helpful if you want to search both singular and plural forms of a word.

See the Advanced Search box below to see how the strategies above work in practice. 

In addition to entering a keyword search in a single box, most databases have an advanced search which allows you to create more nuanced searches with multiple boxes.

In the below example, you will see the above tips in action. In addition to using the OR operator, the AND operator connects each search box in the drop-down menu. You will notice that universal tips like putting common short phrases in quotation marks and using the * (asterisk) to find endings at the end of a root word are used.