Journeys to Enlightenment (FYS 15A)  

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"songs of innocence"

This ensures that the database will return results that include the entire phrase

"songs of innocence"

rather than records that contain both of these words, but not your search phrase:

records that include the word "songs" and the word "of" and the word "innocence" but not the phrase "songs of innocence"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• Begin with a keyword search of your topic:

purgatorio

and note the related subject headings that come up in relevant results:

La Divina Commedia: Purgatorio

• To search for more than one variant of a term, use truncation:

buddhis* will search for

buddhism and buddhist

The database searches for any word that begins with the letters that precede the truncation symbol (in this case, an asterisk). Some databases use other symbols, such as a question mark, for truncation.

• You can also expand your search by including a related term in an "or" search with your first term:

ex. emancipation  or liberation

See the box on Boolean Logic for more about this search technique.