HIS 109: Ancient Egypt and Its Neighbors

The following steps will help you improve your search results:

1. Use main ideas as keywords. Think about the main ideas in your research question and use them as keywords in your search statement. Ex: Your research question is “How did international trade occur in the Near East during the Bronze Age?” so you can search using international trade, Near East, and Bronze Age.
2. Use Boolean Operators to improve your search. Boolean operators are words that help to make your search more precise. There are 3 basic Boolean operators:
   1. AND. By searching for international trade AND Near East your results will only include items that contain both terms.
   2. OR. By searching for international trade OR foreign exchange will return results containing either or both of the terms.
   3. NOT. Using the search Near East NOT Egypt provides results that contain Near East and removes results that contain Egypt, even if those results contain Near East as well.
3. Use Truncation to expand results. Many databases allow you to use "*" (an asterisk) to truncate a term. Truncating allows you to search for all variations of a word using a single search. Ex: trad* will return results for trade, trading, traded, trader, traders, etc. but also for tradition and traditions, so be as precise as possible when using truncation. You can see a sample search using this truncation here.