See the examples below. NOT abortion will retrieve records that contain the word prevention only if the word abortion is not in the record. Nesting is the use of parenthesis to put your keywords into sets. This keyword search will retrieve records that contain the word pregnancy and the record must also contain either the word adolescent or the word teen or both of these words. Nesting is often used when search terms have similar meanings.
Truncation is used to find different forms of words in a keyword search.
Will retrieve records that include the word teen, teens, teenager, teenage, teenagers. Stopwords are commonly used words that will automatically stop a computer keyword search because they occur too frequently in records. Stopwords are usually listed in the help screens of the database you are using. When constructing a keyword search, choose the most important words.