AP LANG - Douglass Book Study Research: Home

Click here for home access usernames and passwords. You must be logged into your MCPS Google account to view this document.

Search Tips

Search by Subject:   is the most precise way to search article databases. Database looks for subjects only in the subject heading or descriptor field, where the most relevant words appear

Search by Keyword: is how you typically search web search engines.  Think of important words or phrases and type them in to get results.

Advanced Search Options:

Boolean operators:

• They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
• The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.

Use AND in a search to:

• narrow your results
• tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records

Use OR in a search to:

• connect two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
• broaden your results, telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records

Use NOT in a search to:

• exclude words from your search
• narrow your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms

Stop Words:

Stop words are frequently occurring, insignificant words that appear in a database record, article or web page.

Common stop words include: a, an, the, in, of, on, are

More search tips from MIT Library 

Research Help 

 

Noodletools

Use Noodletools for note taking, and citing your source

Click on the image to get started.

Need Help? -Noodletools Quick Guide