While we may be most accustomed to using natural language or question searching in Google or web search engines, library databases are built differently and are most effectively accessed using keywords, truncation symbols, phrase searching, and proximity operators. 

Keywords describe your research topic, and are the words that describe the most important themes and ideas within your thesis or question.

Example topic: "The state of artificial intelligence in higher education outside of the United States"

Boolean operators include AND, OR, NOT to either narrow or broaden a search. Many databases require operators to be typed in all caps. 

With the example topic above, you can use Boolean operators to shift from natural language searching to a keyword search:

(artificial intelligence AND higher education) NOT united states

	AND narrows or limits a search by requiring that the results contain both or all search terms/words. artificial intelligence AND higher education
	OR broadens or expands a search by requiring that the results contain either or any of the terms.     Useful for finding synonymous or related words. higher education OR college OR university
	NOT narrows or limits a search by excluding sources with a specified search term. higher education NOT united states

Truncation search includes a symbol, most commonly an asterisk * but possibly !, ? or # at the end of a word root to look for various word endings.

• universit* finds university as well as universities; child* finds child, child's, children
   

Wildcard search uses a symbol, often an asterisk * or ?, in place of an unknown character or characters for words with variant spellings.

• labo*r find labor as well as labour; wom?n finds woman as well as women
   

Phrase search uses quotation marks " " around phrases or word combinations.  This ensures a database searches a term or concept like "artificial intelligence" as a phrase and not as separate words.  

• "artificial intelligence" AND "higher education" may find more focused or fewer irrelevant search results than the same search without quotes.

Note: Depending on the database, searching a phrase without quotes may return some results with the exact phrase and some results with terms appearing as separate words in separate contexts.  Therefore, some search results may not be relevant to your topic.  Experiment with and without quotes to see how results differ and also check the Help screens of specific databases.
 

Proximity operators include WITH, NEAR, W#, N# to narrow searches to find results in which words are found near or within a certain distance of one another. In full text searching, this can increase the likelihood that words or phrases are found within the same context.

• "artificial intelligence" N5 "higher education" in EBSCO databases retrieves results in which the two terms are within 5 words of each other in either order.  
   

Combining Various Search Strategies in Ebsco's ERIC database

• BASIC SEARCH SCREEN, with use of parentheses () or Nested Searching

The basic search screen in most databases provides one search box.  Therefore, use parentheses ( ) aka nested searching to group various concepts or search operations.   

• ADVANCED SEARCH SCREEN

The advanced search screen provides multiple search boxes.  Parentheses are not needed in this example because concepts are already organized within boxes.