French Existentialism: An Introduction (FREN 143A) 

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"french literature"

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

"French literature"

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

records that include the word "French" and the word "literature" but not the phrase "French literature"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• Begin with a keyword search of your topic:

existentialism and literature

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

Existentialism in literature

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

existential* will search for

existential and existentialism

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. france or french

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

• If the database you are searching allows you to specify a search field (i.e. keyword, subject, author, title etc.), then you can search these fields as long as you know that the term you're using appears in that index.

For example, you might begin with a keyword search for sartre but find that the database lists Sartre, Jean-Paul as a subject heading. By searching for Sartre, Jean-Paul as a subject in this particular database, you ensure that every one of your results treats your topic as a subject.

If you search for the keyword sartre in this database, you might find records among your results where Sartre is mentioned but the author is not the main topic of the article or book. Sometimes you may want to look at these records too, so consider keyword searching in addition to searching the subject or other index fields.