If you want to search on two or more words as a phrase, you can put them within quotation marks.
Example: "academic English"
The search retrieves records with that phrase. If you search on the words without quotation marks, you will obtain results with the words academic and English but not necessarily the phrase academic English.
The operator AND can be used to combine words that you want to come up in the search results. In many databases you get the same result if you combine words with the operator or not.
Example: humour AND advertisements
The search retrieves records containing the words humour and advertisements.
If you want to obtain records that contain at least one of the words entered, you can use the operator OR. You can combine two or more words. The operator OR is useful for searching on for example synonyms, related terms, narrower terms or words with alternative spelling.
Example: loanwords OR "loan words" OR "word borrowing"
The search retrieves records containing at least one of the terms.
The operatorn NOT can be used to exclude words in the search results. Use the operator with caution so that you do not exclude relevant sources.
Example: "reading comprehension" NOT dyslexia
The search retrieves records containing the term reading comprehension but not dyslexia.
If you want to combine different operators, you can use parentheses.
Example: (children OR adolescents OR teenagers) AND ( "language teaching" OR "language instruction")
The search retrieves records containing one of the words in the first parentheses and one of the words in the second parentheses.
You can also place parentheses within parentheses.
Example: (mousetrap) OR ((mouse OR rat) AND trap)
The search retrieves records containing the word mousetrap or a combination of mouse or rat and trap.
Truncation can be used to search on a word stem with different endings.
Example: psychoanaly*
The search retrieves records with words that begin with psychoanaly, such as psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic and psychoanalytical.