Constructing Your Search Statement

In the search box you can enter one or more keywords for which you want to find matches in the electronic articles.  When combining multiple concepts, as is the case here, you must use the AND operator.

When searching for a phrase, e.g. women athletes, enclose the phrase in double quotation marks, e.g. "women athletes".

Frequently you will not know the exact form of a word that is used in an article.  In such cases, the use of a truncation symbol can be useful.  In most of our databases the truncation symbol is the asterisk (*).  So in our example here, stereotyp* will give us stereotype, stereotypes, stereotyped, stereotypical, and stereotyping. 

If you want to further narrow your search results, you can always add more keywords to your search statement, e.g. advertising and stereotyp* and women.

Limiting to Full-Text Articles

Unfortunately, not every article found in our databases contains the full text of the article.  Sometimes there will be only a one-paragraph summary of the article, called an Abstract.  In other cases, there may be only a brief Citation, giving you just basic publication information about the article.

Since we have millions of articles to choose from, you will usually get quite satisfactory results by limiting your searches just to those articles that contain the full text.  In our example here, we have done that by checking the full-text box.

Note:  If you come across an article that does not contain the full text and it is important to your research, talk to one of our friendly librarians.  We have a variety of means of tracking down articles, and in most cases we should be able to obtain the full text for you.

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