Know what truncation is and how to use it to expand your search. AND , OR , NOT to limit or expand your search. Know how to nesting terms for grouping search elements. Know how to do Field-specific searching to make your search more precise. When an article is indexed in an database, it is given subject headings that describe what information is covered in the article.
Subject headings are limited to a set of terms developed by the company that produces the database.
Rather than thinking of every possible synonym, find and use the subject heading for that concept to retrieve all relevant articles, regardless of what terms where used by the authors. . A specific subject heading may be difficult to find or not exist for your concept . Truncation Truncation allows you to search for a root form of a word and pick up all variations of that term. Truncating broadens your search and ensure that you retrieve all items containing some form of that word. Databases use different symbols to truncate words.