Connectors—Use "and" or "or" to specify multiple words in any field. Use "not" to exclude words. Be careful with the latter; you may exclude important results because of an unexpected occurrence of the term in the excluded record(s). Some database use "and not" in place of "not."
Examples of Boolean logic:
If you discover pertinent citations to journal articles in your online searches, use Find it!, OneSearch, or Fetch Item to track down your resources.
If we don't own or subscribe to the material online, you can obtain rapidly many articles and chapters via the Libraries' ILL software, ILLiad.
Periodical articles can provide excellent coverage of a topic. Articles appear in scholarly journals, trade publications, and popular periodicals, as well as newspapers. You will typically use a database to search for articles by topic or author. National newspapers are excellent for critical essays on art, editorials, and reviews of exhibitions.
Many assignments require students to limit their search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles. "Peer-reviewed," "scholarly," "academic,"and "refereed" are often used interchangeably to describe manuscripts that underwent expert review before publication.
Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in databases. In many cases using keywords works well. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by the specialized terms of the database, also known as "controlled vocabulary," and often referred to as "descriptors." The order in which you enter your terms can matter as well. For example, often you can best search by author by typing the last name before the first name.
