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AOT 265 - Digital Design Paper

2. Search Tips

Library databases work by having you search for keywords, instead of full sentences. Check out the tips below on how to come up with keywords on your topic.

Keywords

As you think about what concepts you want to research, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic.

Keywords work best by trial-and-error. Never do only one search. Some keywords will work better than others, and some keywords may lead you to different articles than you found in your first search. 

Search the databases with the keywords you selected to find relevant articles. And remember to ask a librarian if you need assistance coming up with keywords or looking for sources.

Quotation Marks

If your keyword is more than one word, put quotation marks around your keyword in the library database. This will search your keyword as a whole instead of as individual words.

Examples
  • "digital design"
  • "digital marketing"
  • "color psychology"

AND

AND is the most common of the Boolean Operators. AND will narrow down your search so you get fewer results, because it is telling the database that your search results must include every one of your search terms.

When you use AND to combine your keywords, keep in mind that while you will get results that have all of your keywords together, they might not necessarily be next to one another.

Examples
  • "Digital marketing" AND AI
  • "digital design" AND trends AND business
  • "Print media" AND digital AND adapt

OR

The Boolean Operator OR broadens your search. Remember that in database searching, OR means MORE results. OR tells the database that you want results that mention one or both of your search terms.

OR is a helpful operator to use if you have a search term that can describe the same idea, like "digital design" or "web design" You will notice when you do your searching, that some authors might use the term "digital design" and others will use "web design" to mean the same thing. OR helps you make sure that you find the most possible articles about your topic.

Examples
  • "digital design" OR "web design"
  • Newspapers OR magazines OR "print media"
  • "color psychology" OR "color theory"

Truncation

Replacing the end of a word with an asterisk * tells the search to find all of the words that start with the letters you have included. This can help you expand your search to find all variations of a word.

Examples

  • advert* will search for advertising, advertisement, advertisements, etc.
  • design* will search for design, designed, designing, etc.