Use OR to broaden your search.
- For example, if you search feminism OR gender, you will find articles that include either term.
Use AND to narrow your search.
- For example, if you search feminism AND Africa, you will only find articles that include both terms.
Use NOT to exclude results with certain words.
- If you search "women's movement" NOT Nigeria you will find articles that include the phrase "women's movement" except for those that also include the term Nigera.
- In Google, use a minus sign instead of NOT (e.g. "women's movement" -Nigeria).
- You do have to be careful with this approach because just one mention of the term or phrase you are excluding may hide potentially relevant information from your results.
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase (two words or more).
- “feminist theory”
- “women's movements”
- “West Africa”
Use a truncation symbol (the asterisk * is the most common) to look for different word endings or variant spellings of words.
- femini* = feminine, feminino (Spanish), feminist, feminism, etc.
- wom*n = woman, women
- politic* = politic, politics, political, etc.