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This guide © 2025 by UCL - Library Skills is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
Sometimes, using a few simple search techniques can dramatically improve your search results
When you're ready to bring it all together and construct your search, see compiling a search strategy.
When searching for a phrase, it's a good idea to put the phrase in quotation marks:
"social media"
fake news about coronavirus is circulating via social media
This will ensure that the words are searched next to each other, as a phrase.
Without the quotation marks, often databases will carry out the search as if you had combined them with AND, for example social AND media. This means the words might not be found next to each other:
social media
media reports suggest that people are adhering to social distancing
IMPORTANT: Some databases will search for two words next to each other as a phrase by default. Notably, this is how searches on the Ovid platform are carried out. At UCL this includes databases such as Medline, Embase, and PsycINFO. Always check the help pages for the database you are using to ensure you understand how your search is carried out.
Make sure that you type the quotation marks into the search box, don't copy and paste from Word or the Web.
'Stop words' are common words, such as the, and, of or in, that many databases automatically ignore when processing a search.
E.g. If searching for quality of life or the role of diet in health, many databases will disregard the words of, the and in, and search only for quality, life, role, diet and health.
This can affect the retrieval of specific phrases or titles that rely on these words for accuracy. Some databases allow you to force the inclusion of stop words by using quotation marks and searching for a phrase, e.g. "quality of life". It is useful to be aware of this behaviour, especially when searching for phrases or titles that include common words.
Truncation is a technique which can broaden your search, where your search term has a common root but multiple possible endings. Using truncation correctly saves you from having to think of all possible variants of the same term.
Type the root of the word, followed by the truncation symbol. Most databases use the asterisk as the truncation symbol.
This will search for the different possible endings of the word.
Psycholog* will find:
Psychology
Psychologist
Psychological
Be careful not to truncate too early, as you may retrieve irrelevant results:
Psych* will also find:
Psychiatry
Psyche
Psychic
Use Boolean operators to combine your search terms together.
Use OR to combine different synonyms for the same subject, so that results which contain any of those synonyms are retrieved:
teenager OR adolescent OR "young person"
Use AND to combine different subjects, to ensure you only retrieve results where both subjects are covered:
teenager AND "social media"
Use NOT with caution. For example if you searched for teenager NOT adult, you would not retrieve any results which talk about adults, but you would also not retrieve papers that discuss both teenagers and adults..
Often you will use a combination of search operators to construct your search, grouping similar concepts in brackets to ensure the search runs in the correct order:
(teenager OR adolescent OR "young person") AND ("social media" OR facebook OR twitter)
These videos and guidance provide advice on general searching principles, but remember every database works a little differently so be sure to read the help pages for the database you are using. This way, you will know how the database processes the search terms and any techniques you have used.
