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Hello and welcome to building an effective search, tips and tricks. Writing a research
paper can be easy if you develop a strategy. Follow these few tips and tricks to help you
through the process. Here are a few things to remember, write out your research topic/keywords
in a sentence or statement. Remember to use Boolean Operators AND, OR, NOT. Using parentheses
or quotation marks can help you keep search terms together. An asterisk can help you with
spelling variations, for example mother* will find: mother, mothers, motherhood, etc. Find
the help button in any database to learn additional search tips. Let's get started. For your first
search, you're writing a paper on how ADHD affects learning in elementary aged children.
I wrote out two examples of how you can start to build your search. Option 1, ADHD AND learning
AND elementary school AND students, or Option 2, ADHD AND learning AND (elementary school
OR middle school) NOT (high school). Notice elementary school and middle school are separated
by the operator or with parentheses. This indicates that I am looking for papers that
use either term. High school is in parentheses because I want to find those two terms together,
just like you see them. In some databases parentheses work well and in other quotation
marks are best. Please refer to the help feature in your database for clarification. For our
first search, either search option will work well. In this case I'm going to choose option
2. In this instance we are going to search Academic Search Complete and other databases
on the EBSCO platform. Please launch your search from one of your research guides. Go
to online resources, scroll down to your core databases, select Academic Search Complete.
You are ready to search in Academic Search Complete. Please go to Choose Databases to
select additional education databases. You see Academic Search Complete is selected here.
Scroll down to Education Full Text, Education Index Retrospective, Education Administrative
Abstracts, select OK. Now add your search terms, keep our boolean AND here, learning,
use your drop down menu as appropriate, AND, elementary school OR middle school. Please
add your parentheses. We are going to add a row and use a boolean operator NOT and type
in high school. We're also going to put that in parentheses and we're going to select search.
You retrieved 70 items from your search. Scroll through and examine your search results. Notice
your search terms are bolded. You can refine your search using the information on the left
hand side, by date, by journal type, etc. This concludes building an effective search,
tips and tricks. I hope you found this information useful.