Advanced Searching
OR
OR expands your search, and lets you search for many things at the same time. This trick works best when you have two words that mean roughly the same thing, for example America and United States. You can search for both terms like this: "United States" OR America.
You can use this in combination with AND by adding parentheses like this: music AND ("United States" OR America).
Truncation
You could use OR to search for word variations, but there is an easier way. If you want to use all of these keywords (teach, teaching, teacher, teachers), you can use a truncation symbol to tell the database to search for all the words that start a certain way, but end differently. For example, searching for teach* will find books and articles about teaching, teachers, and any other variations it can find. (Some databases may use a different symbol for truncation.)
OR expands your search, and lets you search for many things at the same time. This trick works best when you have two words that mean roughly the same thing, for example America and United States. You can search for both terms like this: "United States" OR America.
You can use this in combination with AND by adding parentheses like this: music AND ("United States" OR America).
Truncation
You could use OR to search for word variations, but there is an easier way. If you want to use all of these keywords (teach, teaching, teacher, teachers), you can use a truncation symbol to tell the database to search for all the words that start a certain way, but end differently. For example, searching for teach* will find books and articles about teaching, teachers, and any other variations it can find. (Some databases may use a different symbol for truncation.)