In Preparing to search for information on your topic or idea, the best strategy is to break your idea down into key words. Further, it is best to place a different idea in each row of the search form.
Keywords keywords keywords
When beginning to search for information on your topic, find out a little bit about the topic so that you can think of all the words that best describe the topic. Consider taking a look in your text book for search term ideas.
Composing a search
Consider the following example. In the first search box I have two search terms that get at the same idea. I've linked them together with the word 'or' so that the database will find one or the other search term.
"flowering plants" or angiosperms
A couple of things to take note of: if you have a phrase, put it in quotes--that will keep the words together in the search. Also, the database doesn't look for the word 'or' rather, that acts as an operator to look for one term, the other term, or both together.
Next, I've added "diversification" in the second box. Notice the pull-down between the boxes is set to 'and'. This too is an operator.
The task os constructing a search is to create a mathematical expression with words. The example below written out would look something like this:
("flowering plants" or angiosperms) and diversification
