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 that have either one of your search terms. You will get more results when you use OR.
Put quote marks around phrases. This means you want only articles that contain those words next to one another as a phrase. Searching "communicative competence"with quotes will find only articles with those words in the text as a phrase. You will get fewer results when you use quotations to find exact phrases.
Using an asterisk (*) when you search tells the database you want all variations of a word; this is called truncation. For example, if you search for communicat*, you will get results for communication, communicate, communicative, etc.. This is especially helpful if you want to search both singular and plural forms of a word. Note: occasionally a database will use a different symbol for this function.
You can combine these tips into a single search by using nesting. For example, we could search (children OR youth OR teen*) AND "communicative competence". We put parentheses around our OR section to tell the database we want want articles using any of the words children, youth, or teen (with any kind of endings on teen, like teenagers). Then we use AND to find within those articles the ones that also include the exact phrase communicative competence .
