*Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

The following search strategies can be used in our library catalog, Library OneSearch and in many of our library databases.

Combine keywords with AND, OR, NOT:

• Use AND to narrow your search. For example, using adolescence AND anxiety will find articles with both terms, giving you more specific results.
• Use OR to broaden your results, such as using latinx OR latina OR latino will find articles with any term, giving you more results.
• Use NOT to filter out results with terms you don't need. For example, Mexico NOT "New Mexico" will filter out any article that mentions New Mexico. It is a quick way to potentially cut out a lot of results-- but think about how it will affect your search to eliminate a keyword entirely.

Phrase Searching: Use double quotation marks " " around your search terms to search for them as a phrase. For example, the search "Combahee River Collective" will return results for that exact phrase.

Truncation (*): The asterisk * will search for all variant endings of a word root. For example, feminis* will returns results for feminist, feminists, feminism, etc.

Grouping Keywords: Use parentheses ( ) around your search terms to group them together. For example, the search ("drag balls" OR "ballroom culture") AND ("new york") will search for resources that mention New York, and either drag balls or ballroom culture.