American History

Developing an effective search strategy involves:

• Identifying the key search concepts 
   
• Identifying related terms to your key search concepts
   
• Using standard search structures to broaden and narrow your search results

While there is not one right way to do a search, the strategies identified here will improve your results.

["101st Airborne at Little Rock Central High" by US Army - US Army. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

Never use sentence structure, such as your research question or thesis statement.

A keyword is a word used to search library catalogs (GIL-Find, GIL-Find Universal), article databases (GALILEO), and web search engines (Google Scholar) in order to locate results that match that word in a specified part or in any part of the item, such as the title or in the full text. Once you have identified your key search concepts, start noting down some related terms or synonyms to your key concepts.

Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries, subject encylopedias, and subject headings to help you formulate keywords. 

Quotation marks can be used to identify phrases.

By using quotations marks, you are telling the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.

“Atlantic Slave Trade”
Instead of
Atlantic AND slave AND trade

“tobacco plantations”
Instead of
tobacco AND plantations

“Dutch West India Company”
Instead of
Dutch AND West AND India AND Company

Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms from your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses 3 terms (AND, OR, and NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms.

Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternate endings.The character (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.

Crimin* retrieves

Criminal

Criminals

Criminological

Criminology