HIST 301: The Historian’s Craft: Reading, Research and Writing History

Boolean Searches

• AND: searches for all of the search terms.  Using *and* in between search terms will narrow your search.  For example
  • women and prohibition  
• OR: searches for at least one of the search terms.  Using *or* in between search terms will broaden your search. For example: 
  • women or female 
  • prohibition or temperance 
• NOT: excludes the search term immediately after the NOT operator.  Therefore, use "not" in front of a term to ensure that the search will not include that term. For example: 
  • alcohol not drugs 
• Phrase searches
  • Please quotation marks (“ “) around the words that you want to be search together as a phrase. For example:
    • "Eighteenth Amendment" 
    • "Women's Christian Temperance Movement" 
• Wildcard searches
  • The use of the asterisk (*) is a wildcard that most databases all you to use to search a root word and variable endings to broaden search results.  For example: 
    • latin* (retrieves "latin," "latins," "latino," "latinos," "latina," "latinas")

When you are searching the library catalog for books on your topic, "historiography" is a useful keyword, because it is used in Library of Congress Subject Headings. For example:

• Historiography--.Great Depression
• United States --Politics and government --1783-1865 --Historiography.
• World War, 1914-1918 --Historiography.
• Europe--Historiography.