Database Search Tips

The operators AND, OR, and NOT are explained below:

AND lets you see where two topics overlap.

Detroit AND bankruptcy finds everything that has both the term "Detroit" and the term "bankruptcy"

OR lets you search for more than one term.

Software Engineers OR Programmers finds everything that has either the terms "software engineers" or "programmers"

NOT lets you exclude a term.

For more information on Boolean operators, see our Search Techniques, Part 1 Tutorial.

Keyword vs. Subject

Keyword Vs. Subject Searches
	Keyword Search	Subject Search
Description	Keyword searches are similar to Google searches in that the database will look for the words you use wherever they may be on a page. Regardless of whether the word is in a title, author name, place of publication or footnote, the page will be returned as a result.	Subject searches, on the other hand, only return results in which the term being used appears in the subject field. Searching in the subject is similar to searching by tags on your favorite blog – different pages have different subject "tags."
Search For	Records that have the search term anywhere within them.	Records that have the search term in the subject headings part of that record.
Results	Depending on the terms you use, searches may retrieve no results or thousands. Searches with general terms often return many results.	Varies widely. Some searches will retrieve hundreds of results, but, if you choose a nonexistent subject term, you will get none.
Relevance	Varies. Results may be completely unrelated to your topic.	High as long as you identify the correct subject for your topic.
Flexibility	High: Terms can be combined in complex ways to design effective searches.	The flexibility of your search is limited by the manner in which subjects are structured in the database that you are searching.

For more information on keyword and subject searching, see our Search Techniques, Part 2 Tutorial.