WGS 107b: Native American & Indigenous Women, Gender(s), and Dance

• You can enclose search phrases in quotes:

"hoop dance"

This ensures that the database will return results that include the entire phrase

"hoop dance"

rather than records that contain both of these words, but not your search phrase:

records that include the word dance and the word hoop but not the phrase "hoop dance"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• To search for more than one variant of a term, use truncation:

ancest* will search for

ancestor, ancestral, and ancestry

The database searches for any word that begins with the letters that precede the truncation symbol (in this case, an asterisk). Some databases use other symbols, such as a question mark, for truncation.

• If you want to broaden a search, you can revise it by including your original term with a related term in an "or" search:

ex. women OR female

• To exclude a word from your search, use the term NOT. For example, you can exclude bird migration from a search about human migration:

   migration NOT birds

• See the box on Boolean Logic for more about this search technique.