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Search Strategies and Techniques

This guide will walk you through various search strategies you could use in the library databases.

Quotation Marks

Sometimes you may want to search for a phrase (2 or more words) in a database. When you are searching phrases, put quotation marks around the phrase. This will tell the database to search the phrase as a whole, instead of as individual words.

Examples

"common cold"

"primary school"

"community college"

EBSCO

Example of searching "community college" in EBSCO

Gale

Example searching "community college" in Gale Power Search