GEOG 2750 Spatial Analysis and Modeling: How to Search

Quotation Marks/Phrase Searching

Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase, this narrows a search. Example: "displaced persons"

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

And—narrows a search by inclusion. Example: Rwanda and genocide

Or—expands a search. Example: refugees or "displaced persons"

Not—narrows a search by exclusion. Example: refugees not Syria*

Truncation

Truncation, usually using an asterisk*, increases the number of results you'll retrieve by searching for variant endings of a word root.
Example: immigra* will find: immigrant, immigration, immigrated

Your search strategy will combine keywords related to your topic using the search techniques described above. Here are a couple examples:
                                  1. Vietnam* and (refugees or "displaced persons")
                                  2. migra* and "civil war"

This search strategy is what you will type into the search box in a library database or Google to find sources about your topic.

A database is a collection of sources including books, ebooks, magazines, journals, and newspapers. The short video below describes how to run a search in FiSH. FiSH (First, Search Here), searches most of the library resources using one simple search box. To access FiSH, visit the Library Home Page.

More video tutorials available on the Lakeland Library Youtube Page.