Know which fields your search tool is searching - full text or metadata?
Concept | Explanation | Example |
Phrase search (quotes required) |
search for an exact phrase (most, but not all, databases use quotation marks) | “death penalty” “standardized test” “reality TV” |
Boolean logic (for keyword searching) | use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for more precise searching |
See following examples |
AND | search for records that have all of the words (narrows the search) |
race and poverty drug use and educational attainment |
OR | search for records that have any of the words (broadens the search) |
homosexual or gay or lesbian or queer china or japan or korea |
NOT | exclude records that have the word (narrows the search) | advertising not (TV or television) |
Truncation | search for a root word with any ending (most, but not all, databases use an asterisk *) | adolescen* [finds adolescent, adolescents, adolescence] |
Concept | Definition | Example |
Complex Boolean Search | place search words for the same concept in the same search box (or in parentheses) |
(spous* or wife or wives or husband* or domestic partner*) and (abus* or batter* or violen*) |
Proximity | require words to appear within a certain distance of each other n (for “near”) = words can appear in any order w (for “within”) = words must appear in specified order | poverty n4 mental health african w2 american* (n# and w# indicate the maximum number of intervening words) note: if no quotes or proximity connectors or are used, Ebsco defaults to w5 |
Field qualification (field limiting) | require words to appear in a certain field in the database record (easy way: use dropdown menus) |
au coleman (for author field) ti racial profiling (for title field) |
Limit (filter) | restrict search results to a subset of the database | e.g., by language, year of publication, type of publication |
Add to folder | select or save records from search results for future action | save specified records to display, print, email, or add to bibliographic manager (e.g., RefWorks) later |
Search approximately 300 million books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, data, digital audio, digital video, digital images, government documents and more. It draws from the library catalog (OBIS), many of the full text and article indexing databases, as well as digital repositories from colleges, universities, research centers, and other open-access archives on the web.
Can't find what you need at Oberlin? For books, try OhioLINK. For books not available through OhioLINK and for other types of materials, use Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
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