Connecting your keywords help you better limit or expand your search for more relevant results. Let’s use a real life example: Fred and Sally are going to a music festival, but they cannot seem to agree on which kind of music. Sally wants jazz, but Fred is really into hip-hop.

• If they go with a festival that offers a mix of jazz AND hip-hop, they can only go to a festival that offers both.
• A festival that offers jazz OR hip-hop could potentially just have jazz, just have hip-hop, or have both.
• Finally, if a music festival offers jazz NOT hip-hop, they can only go to hear jazz.

Clearly, Fred and Sally should go with jazz AND hip-hop, so both of them can be happy. These connecting words in library databases work the same way!

• AND will only find articles that contain the words or phrases in both search boxes.
• OR will find articles that have either one or both of the words or phrases.
• NOT will not retrieve any articles found with the second, even if the first happens to be in it.

It's also a good idea to consider what you are asking the database to find and thus, where you are searching.

You can usually ask the database to search in these places:

• Key Fields are the default in many databases and typically fairly efficient. Key fields include the full citation, subject headings, and abstract/summary if there is one. 
• Title can be very useful for narrowing down overwhelming results. Remember that it can eliminate perfectly good results where the keyword may not be in the title.
• Full-text is great when there are not many articles on your subject, but you may need to make your search much more focused.

Putting your search terms in quotes (e.g. "same-sex marriage") will search for them only as a phrase.

Adding an asterisk (*) to the end of a root word will locate all words for which that is that root—a good example is militar* (military, militarism, militarization, and so on).

Read the database directions or the help page for specific instructions on how to search that database.

Make sure you are spelling things correctly.