Suggestions to Improve Search Results

Searching Skills

You can improve your search thereby improving your results (and save time) by following these suggestions:

begin with a basic search rather than an advanced search
begin with keyword searching rather than subject searching
ignore articles like A, An and The at the beginning of titles (also known as "stopwords")
always scan the search results and review the abstract (if available) before going to the full text and printing it out
after conducting a basic search and reviewing some of the results by scanning, conduct Boolean searches or use other search operators and functions to further expand or limit your results
take advantage of the online help offered by the search tool used