Hammering out complete sentences in a library searches will not work very well, so boil your question or topic down to its key words.
If your research question is What are the effects of antidepressants on freshwater life? then antidepressants and freshwater life are your key terms.
Even so, the word life is rather broad, and you may discover it's also useful to use others - like animals, plants - in its place.
Take a look at articles that are near-misses. They may tip you off to terms you hadn't known.
A keyword search searches for your terms almost anywhere in a document: anywhere in the body of the paper, but also in the Author, Subject, and Title fields of the electronic document.
The Subject field can be especially helpful. Creators of electronic documents tag them to help us narrow down our search results, and you can look there for search terms as well.
Take a look all the filtering options in the lefthand column of your search results. You have options to limit your results to peer-reviewed (remember that this mostly applies to articles), to a certain date range, and to specific document types.
Remember that you can clear your filters, too.
S. I. F. T. is an evaluation strategy to help you judge whether or online content can be trusted for credible and reliable information. The SIFT strategy is quick, simple, and can be applied to various kinds of online content: social media posts, memes, statistics, videos, images, news articles, scholarly articles, etc.
This saves you time during the SIFT process.
Below is a brief video (0:37) on how to carry out Control + F.
Search engines are designed to ignore a list of very common words (called stop words) because if they did not, searches would return too many results. A search that included the word the would include every English-language document ever.
These days, search engines use the AND operator by default. That fact, plus search engines ignoring stop words, make quotation marks necessary when searching for an exact phrase.
OR lets you search for items that use any of several words. This is good to use when you know certain words are used interchangeably, like typing business OR organization. OR also increases the number of results that your search returns.
NOT excludes the term from your search. So if I want information about construction equipment, but keep getting information about wading birds, I would try crane NOT bird.
Important: If you use these operators, be sure to USE ALL CAPS, or they won't work.
Putting search terms in quotation marks causes the system to search for the phrase that lies between them, the exact characters in the exact order. Using quotation marks with a phrase also can dramatically reduce the number of results returned to you.
I just typed the phrase study English pronunciation into the library’s search engine, it returned around 5000 results. The top hit had pronunciation in the title, English in the publisher's name, and study in its subject headings.
But when I typed “study English pronunciation” (inside quotation marks) into the same window, it returned only 2 results, and the top hit contained the phrase “... rarely have a chance to study English pronunciation."
You see? The search engine returned only documents containing the exact phrase inside the quotation marks.
Without quotation marks, the engine returned any document containing those three words in any order and any distance from one another.
In academic search engines, an asterisk is used at the end of a word to search for any word that begins with the characters before the asterisk.
I just did a search for organizational behavior, and it produced 73,000 results. A search for organiz* behav* produced almost twice that.
Librarians call this technique truncation, and as you can see, it increases the number of results returned, often dramatically.
