Use keywords or phrases rather than whole sentences
“Baltimore Chinatown” will yield more diverse results than “The history of Chinese Americans in Baltimore, Maryland.”
If you are looking for a specific phrase, place the phrase in quotes to help locate the specific text
To omit a phrase from your search place a hyphen before it to exclude it from the search
Ex. Search Baltimore Chinatown -California to exclude any articles related to California in your search
Use an asterisk to leave a placeholder for a search term
Ex. Search Baltimore Chinese Child* to find articles about children or a child or childcare
Use “?” as a truncation mark in words
Ex. Col?r will yield results containing “color” and “Colour”
Use “and” or “or” for finding multiple terms in one search
“And” will give results for one term and the second term within the same document
“Or” will give results for all documents that contain one term and the second term regardless of if they appear in the same document or not
If the database you are using has an advanced search option, use it to refine your search
Database advanced searches can include date ranges for documents, author names, types of documents, and sometimes the smaller archive a document originally came from
For more tips and tricks see the following sites: