First Year English  

Map out your search, start with major concepts:

• Keywords that describe your topic
• Alternate terms for your concepts and ideas
• Add sub-ideas and alternative terms
• Consider other spellings
• What ideas do you want to combine with your main topic?

Example: I want to study Canadian Arctic Literature

Keywords: literature, arctic, Canada

Alternate terms: Canadian, arctic, northern, populations, Inuit

Sub-ideas: explorers, oral history

Other spellings: Inuit and Inuvialuit

Combine your terms: with the conector words  and or not

arctic or northern Canada --> will bring back documents that contain EITHER word

literature and oral history ---> will bring back documents that contain BOTH words

not European --> will exclude documents that contain the word "European"

The wildcard symbol will help expand your results and can help if you don't know which term the database is using.  These symbols will make the database look for the beginning part of the word in the document (with any variation of the end of the word). For example:

"Canad* history" will bring back the documents "Canada's history" and "Canadian history."

- In many databases, the symbol is *
- In some databases, the symbol is $
- In the Library Catalogue, the symbol is ?