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 contents a of 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, or banners that offer some sort of link to this assistance. This information should help you to easily answer the rest of the questions listed here. Others use a numbers sign. Some databases also allow for a special kind of truncation, called internal truncation . Boolean operators are used to link search terms, combining them in different ways.