Francophone Literatures (FREN 165B) 

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"positive black soul"

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

"positive black soul"

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

records that include the word "positive" and the word "black" and the word "soul" but not the phrase "positive black soul"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• Begin with a keyword search of your topic:

cameroon and history

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

Cameroon--History; Cameroon--Politics and government--To 1960.

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

colon* will search for

colonial, colonize, colonization and colony

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 film or cinema but find that the database lists "motion pictures " as a subject heading. By searching for "motion pictures " 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 keywords film or cinema in this database, you might miss some useful articles or books because these records don't include the word "film" or the word "cinema." Sometimes you may want to do this type of keyword search as well (to catch any relevant results that aren't classifed under the term "motion pictures"), so consider keyword searching in addition to searching the subject or other index fields.