Astronomy (Physics 1500) - Final Project: Finding Articles

Use a combination of the following search techniques to create the most effective searches in the library databases. In addition to the techniques below, make use of the database-specific limiters to focus your search more (date range and source-type limiters can be very helpful, for example).

Keywords—Keywords are one way to create search strategies to locate relevant information on your topic. Keywords are the most significant words and phrases associated with your topic.

Quotation Marks/Phrase Searching—Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase.

            Example: “milky way”    

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

And—narrows a search by inclusion.

Example: "climate change" AND causes retrieves only sources that include both search terms, which limits the number of results.  

Or—expands a search.

Example: SETI OR "search for extra-terrestrial intelligence" will retrieve sources containing either term, expanding your pool of resources.    

Not—narrows a search by exclusion.

Example: planets NOT earth retrieves only sources that contain the first keyword, eliminating sources for keywords that follow not.

Truncation—Usually using an asterisk*, increases the number of results you’ll retrieve by searching for variant endings of a word root.

            Example: map* retrieves map, maps, mapping, etc..