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List synonyms for the keywords that you underlined in your research question. Often words that we think describe what we're searching for aren't what scholars use or have multiple meanings. For example: theater can refer to a surgical or operating theater or a military theater.
| Brexit | British | National Identity |
| European Union | English | Nationalism |
| EU | Britain | Cultural Identity |
Unlike with Google, where you can type in full sentences or questions, when searching in any of the library resources (Primo, journals, or databases) you need to use the Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT to string together your search terms.
| Truncate Root Words | Phrases | Use multiple search terms and parentheses in your search strings |
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Using an * at the end of a word such as nation* will bring back everything with that root (nation, national, nationalism, etc). |
Putting quotation marks around a phrase will tell Primo to keep those words together. For example: "European Union." European Union without quotes can bring back articles on the Commercial Workers' Union protesting against European cooks. The words European and Union both appear, but without being linked together, it's not the concept of European Union that you're looking for. |
(Brexit OR European Union) AND British AND "national identity" Using parentheses is a lot like the distributive property in math. The search inside the parentheses is done first. |
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Be Aware: Be careful about the words you truncate. For example: cell* will bring back everything from cellular phones to cellulitis, so you could quickly make your search results irrelevant. |
Be Aware: Stringing multiple search terms together using AND narrows your search. Therefore, sometimes stringing too many terms together with AND can make your search so narrow you receive few, or no, results. |