Keywords alone mean nothing to a computer. The database checks for the occurrence of the word and not its meaning.

In addition, to get the database to search for sources, we need to use special commands or instructions along with our keywords. In this module we will look at three of these commands.
 
Phrase
When our keywords consist of more than one word, we need to let the database know in our search statement that the words are supposed to be searched for as a phrase. Otherwise the database will search for each word separately. Quotation marks are common phrase instructions and are used when searching Mason’s Library Catalog.

Ex. “global warming” 
 
Truncation
We use truncation to find all the occurrences of our keyword with all its possible word endings. The Mason Library Catalog uses a question mark (?) to truncate a keyword.

Ex. Caus? to find cause, causes, causation, causality, caused, causing
 
The Boolean operator AND
When we want to narrow our search, we use the Boolean operator AND to connect our search terms.

Ex. “global warming” AND cause?

Let’s see what kinds of sources we can find using two important databases at Mason:

 

<next>