Creating a search

Before you search for information you'll need to formulate a search strategy. The best way to do this is as follows:

Identify the key concepts from your essay or research topic
Work out alternative terms for these concepts (synonyms or different spellings)
Decide whether you want to restrict your search to a certain country, date, or group.

These are some of the elements and operators that you can use to build your search.

Element type	Explanation	Example
Synonyms	words with similar meanings or spelling variants	keyword: religion related terms: cults, paganism, christianity
Phrase searches	use quotation marks to search for the term as a phrase	"roman art" "film criticism"
AND searches	will search for both words/phrases	literature and modernism
OR searches	will search for any of the words/phrases	greek or hellenic "feminist anthropology" or (anthropol* and women)
Truncation	australia* modernis*	will find all terms: Australia, Australian, Australians will find all terms: modernist, modernism
Wildcard	wom?n	will find all variations of a word: woman, women

Different combinations of these elements can be used in a keyword search. For example, you could create a search such as:
advanced search example