CHOOSE KEYWORDS
Choose appropriate search terms or keywords. Think about words and phrases that describe your topic. Make sure to include singular and plural forms, alternative words and different spellings. For instance, if you are researching the topic "Motivation of Employees", your keywords might include
motivation, job satisfaction, employee attitude, incentive, employees, human resource management, organizational leadership....
CONNECT KEYWORDS
Group like keywords together (motivation OR incentives); then decide how groups of keywords are related (motivation AND job satisfaction ). Combine these keywords using Boolean "operators" to broaden or narrow your search.
AND - Finds documents containing two or more search terms
Example: motivation AND employee
OR - Finds documents that contain any one of several search terms.
*Be careful because using NOT may discard useful as well as useless information.
PHRASE SEARCHING
Use quotation marks (" ") when your phrase is three words or longer or when you want to force the system to search your terms as a phrase. If you put your words in quotation marks, the system will search for documents where the words appear exactly in that order. Phrase searching is an excellent way to search for a particular term, such as "no child left behind" or "electronic federal tax payment system".
"corporate social responsibility" The system searches for documents where the words appear exactly in this order.
corporate social responsibility (without quotation marks) The system treats the phrase as if the words were joined by (corporate AND social AND responsibility). The search finds any document in which corporate and social and responsibility appear within 200+ words of one another.
