BOOLEAN OPERATORS for Finding Relevant Articles
AND – Use AND when you want documents that contain all terms to appear in your results.
e.g. women AND military
OR – Use OR when you want documents that contain either one of the terms to appear in your results.
e.g. youth OR adolescent OR teenager
NOT – Use NOT when you want to exclude documents that contain terms following NOT in your results.
e.g. women AND California NOT “Los Angeles”
“ ” Quotes – Enclose specific phrases in double quotation marks when you want documents that contain the exact phrases in your results.
e.g. “civil rights” AND women
“The Old Man and the Sea” - exact title
( ) Parentheses – Enclose terms in parentheses you want to group together.
e.g. (women OR female) AND (ethnicity OR race)
* Asterisk as wildcard
e.g. femini* returns all documents containing a word beginning with crim (feminine, feminism, feminism, feminist, etc.)
wom*n returns all documents containing woman or women
When searching, it helps to use "piece words" instead of typing in a full question. For example, if you're trying to study the potential effects of transracial adoption on adoptees in the U.S., you wouldn't type "What is the impact of transracial adoption in the U.S." You could try, and you might still find something, but you'll get more out of your search using keywords.
adoption, adoptee, health, child development, transracial, transcultural, international, united states, U.S., impact, effects, outcomes, upbringing, connection, socio-economic...etc.
Notice some of these seem like synonyms? Using related terms helps expand your search. "Impact" has a bit of a negative connotation, whereas "outcomes" is a more neutral sounding term. Both technically mean the same as "result" but are often used in different ways and contexts. If you're having trouble finding things, the thesaurus is your friend!
If you find a relevant book in the catalog, look at the subject headings (under Subject(s)). Most books are assigned subject headings, and if you click on a heading, it will lead you to a list of books on that same topic.
If you already have a relevant book or article in hand, use its bibliography to find other sources on the same topic. HINT: At the bottom of an article in OneSearch, you can scroll to the bottom of the catalog page and click "cited in this" to get the links! You don't have to look each one up individually!