Family and Consumer Sciences

1. Once you have chosen a topic, write it down in the form of a question or brief statement:
   • What is the relationship between SAT scores and college success?
2. Pull out the keywords and phrases that are most specific to your topic:
   • "SAT scores" and "college success"
3. Take those keywords and phrases and brainstorm related terms, concepts or synonyms
   • SAT scores > "scholastic aptitude test" or "college admission test"
   • college > "university" or "higher education"
   • success > achievement
4. Formulate a search strategy using boolean search, wildcards, phrases, etc.
   • (SAT OR "scholastic aptitude test") AND (college OR universit*) AND (succe* OR achieve*)

1. Use keywords when your term may be very new, very distinctive, or jargon, e.g. "instant messaging" or "XML."
2. Use a variety of keywords. There may be additional items on your topic that use different terms.
3. Be aware that you may retrieve items not related to your topic (called false drops).
4. When you cannot remember the exact title of an item, try a keyword search using the title words you remember.

Variety of terms: If you are looking for items on the "movies," use additional keywords such as "film," "films," "cinema," or "motion pictures."

An example of retrieving results unrelated to your topic (false drops): using the keyword "cricket" will retrieve items about the sport as well as the insect.

• Most databases allow for a symbol to be used at the end of a word to retrieve variant endings of that word. This is known as truncation.
• Using truncation will broaden your search. For example,

  bank* will retrieve: bank or banks or banking or banker or bankruptcy, etc.

• Databases and Internet search engines use different symbols to truncate. In general, most of the Library's databases use the asterisk (*) ; however, the exclamation point (!) is used in LexisNexis. Check the database help screen to find the correct truncation symbol.
• Be careful using truncation. Truncating after too few letters will retrieve terms that are not relevant. For example:

  cat* will also retrieve cataclysm, catacomb, catalepsy, catalog, etc.

  It's best to use the boolean operator "or" in these instances (cat or cats).

Some databases allow for wild cards to be embedded within a word to replace a single character. For instance, you can also use the question mark (?) within a word to replace a character. For example:

wom?n will retrieve woman or women

Use AND between terms to narrow your search

example: television AND violence AND children

Use OR and/or truncate (*, ?) words to broaden your search

example: children OR youth OR adolescents

example: child* (will find child, children, etc.) Note: check online help for the correct truncation symbol

Boolean operators are words (or, and, not) used to connect search terms to expand (or) or narrow (and, not) a search within a database to locate relevant information. Boolean operators are also called logical operators or connectors.

It is helpful to diagram the effects of these operators:

Use AND between terms to narrow your search

Use OR and/or truncate (*, ?) words to broaden your search

Note: check online help for the correct truncation symbol