Ask yourself the following questions, read every screen carefully, and use online help and assistance from Librarians to help ensure a more effective, efficient search. Knowing the content of a database is invaluable to any researcher. If you need to find political science resources but are unwittingly searching a biology database, you've wasted a lot of time and energy. The same idea goes for chronological ranges and resource types. Be sure that the database you're searching covers your topic, fits any chronological limits you may have, and indexes the types of materials that you need.
Every database comes with some sort of online help for the novice searcher.
Read screens carefully for buttons, bars, banners, or menu choices that offer some sort of link to this assistance. This information should help you to easily answer the rest of the questions listed here. While most databases use an asterisk as the truncation symbol, some may use other symbols such as an exclamation point or pound sign. Some databases even allow for a special kind of truncation called internal truncation. Boolean operators are used to link search terms, combining them in different ways.