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ENG 112: Dual Enrollment: College Composition II (Stephens-Loudoun)

This guide has been created by librarians to help you find books, articles, videos, and other types of resources related to this program of study. Direct comments to Julie Combs, jcombs@nvcc.edu.

Search Tools

Below are a few search tools that may be useful when searching in databases or search engines while researching careers. If you are not getting the results you want, try using a boolean operator, phrase, or truncation to broaden or narrow your search results.

Searching Tools

BOOLEAN OPERATORS

Use AND, OR, and NOT to connect your search words together and either narrow or broaden your set of results

higher education AND college costs

Use AND between two or more terms to find sources with all the concepts. Searching for higher education AND college costs will only include results that have both higher education and college costs in their contents.

universities OR colleges

Use OR between similar concepts.  Searching for universities OR colleges will find sources that refer to either term.  You must capitalize OR.

student loans NOT financial aid

 Use NOT to exclude terms from your search. Searching for student loans NOT financial aid will find sources that refer to student loans but will exclude any that refer to financial aid, a type of student loan.
   
PHRASES Using boolean operators can make sure multiple words are present in search results, but searching for phrases makes sure that multiple words appear in a certain order.

"college students" 

 Use quotation marks ( " " ) around specific phrases such as "college students" to find the words in that specific order.
   
TRUNCATION
Use truncation to search for multiple derivations of root words all at the same time.

educat*

 Use an asterisk ( * ) to find multiple versions of one word.  Using educat* as a search term will include results that refer to education, educate, educational, educators, and educating.