Keyword Searching Principles
Use AND to connect terms to retrieve every record in which all of the specified words appear, regardless of their position in the records. AND is generally used to combine unlike concepts.
children and death and parent
grief and wife
Use OR to connect terms to retrieve every record in which any one of the words or both appear in the records regardless of their position in the records. OR is usually used to combine like concepts, synonymous terms, or variant spellings.
grief or bereavement
death or mortality
Use NOT to exclude any words following NOT. The statement will retrieve records in which only the first term appears. The NOT should be used with caution.
death not euthanasia
Nesting enables you to make complex searches. Use parenthesis to indicate which terms should be searched together.
(grief or bereavement) and wife
Phrase Searching: Words that you want to search together as a phrase, like sudden death, put in quotes: "sudden death"
Truncation: To search for the different word endings of a word like: child, children, child's, use an asterisk for example: child*
Field Searching: In the Library Catalog you can specify fields to search using field abbreviations.
a: (author) t: (title) s:(subject) For example: a: Kubler-Ross and s:death
Use AND to connect terms to retrieve every record in which all of the specified words appear, regardless of their position in the records. AND is generally used to combine unlike concepts.
children and death and parent
grief and wife
Use OR to connect terms to retrieve every record in which any one of the words or both appear in the records regardless of their position in the records. OR is usually used to combine like concepts, synonymous terms, or variant spellings.
grief or bereavement
death or mortality
Use NOT to exclude any words following NOT. The statement will retrieve records in which only the first term appears. The NOT should be used with caution.
death not euthanasia
Nesting enables you to make complex searches. Use parenthesis to indicate which terms should be searched together.
(grief or bereavement) and wife
Phrase Searching: Words that you want to search together as a phrase, like sudden death, put in quotes: "sudden death"
Truncation: To search for the different word endings of a word like: child, children, child's, use an asterisk for example: child*
Field Searching: In the Library Catalog you can specify fields to search using field abbreviations.
a: (author) t: (title) s:(subject) For example: a: Kubler-Ross and s:death