Prince George's Community College

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Largo, Maryland 20774

Tools for the Topics: Selecting Sources
Module 2

Search Strategies for Online Resources

Learning basic search strategies is the key to effectively and efficiently searching the online catalog, online databases, and the Web. The first step is to identify the keywords that are the most important in defining the topic. One of the basic techniques for searching is using the Boolean Operators. Boolean searching is a symbolic logic system that creates relationships between concepts and words. Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT connect each keyword and/or keyword phrase in a statement such as: What is the relationship between United States intelligence operations and counterterrorism?

Use AND to narrow a search strategy and to look for two or more terms in your result.

Example: United States AND counterterrorism

 

 

Use OR to broaden a search and to find either or both concepts in the result.

Example: counterterrorism OR counter terrorism

Use NOT before a term to exclude it from your result.

Example: intelligence NOT IQ

Use nesting to build a more complex search by putting keywords and/or phrases in parentheses to determine their relationship when more than one operator is used.

Example: (United States AND intelligence) AND (counterterrorism OR counter terrorism)

©Ryan Hutchison

Taking time to learn basic and advanced search strategies and to read help screens for online cataogs, online databases, and search engine will improve your precision and retrieve better results. Click on the Search Strategies to view additional techniques

Before going to the next module, take the quiz to get an assessment of your understanding for this module by clicking on the link below.