Place quotation marks around phrases, names, or titles
Use the asterisk symbol (*) at the end of a word to retrieve variant endings of that word
ex. femini* will retrieve: feminism, feminine or femininity
Use a question mark within a word as a wildcard
ex. wom?n will retrieve woman or women
Keyword vs Subject Searching
Keyword Searching
Your topic itself may prove to be the words that make up your search term(s).
Keywords searches look for that search term(s) in the:
title, subject, author, summary or abstract fields.
Keywords found frequently or throughout an article may push that article higher in the search results.
Keywords matches do not distinguish between context and purpose.
Subject Searching
A subject search will locate materials by Library of Congress Subject Headings, which is a controlled vocabulary or standard list of subject terms. The University Library assigns Library of Congress Subject Headings to all items listed in the online catalog.
The number of results may vary widely. Some searches will retrieve hundreds of results but if you choose a nonexistent subject term while others get nothing.
If you do not know the appropriate subject heading for your topic, conduct a keyword search first and look at the subject heading(s) for relevant items.
