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Tips for Searching Databases

Multiple Key Words or Phrases: Place in separate boxes or separate by Boolean operators. Don’t string them together all on one line as you would in Google.

Phrase Search: Use quotation marks to indicate a phrase search (“Spanish civil war,” "income inequality")

Truncation: Add an asterisk * to the end of a term to retrieve results with multiple endings
For example: histor* will retrieve records for history, historical, historian, historicity, etc. 

Boolean Operators can help you expand or narrow your search

AND: (refugees AND Serbia) Narrows your search so that only records containing both search terms come back to you.
OR: (moral OR ethical) Broadens your search so that all records containing the word moral as well as all records containing the word ethical come back to you.
NOT: (Nero NOT Wolfe) will brings back records about the emperor but none that are about the mystery novelist Nero Wolfe.