Page 1+ Search Tips

Type in the topic, person, or place that you need information on. For example:

• Political engagement
• Canada politics
• Youth voting

If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, add more descriptive terms. For example, start with:

• Generic: politics
• More precise: politics participation
• Even more precise: politics participation Canada

Try searching for information using specific terms that are unique to your discipline (for instance, keywords found in your textbook). For example:

• Not ideal: energy from the sun
• Better: solar panels
• Even better: renewable energy

• Not ideal: Are Canadian youth politically engaged?
• Better: Canadian youth political engagement

Page 1+ allows you to search for an exact phrase by surrounding it with quotation marks (“). For example:

• “Political engagement” will find results with that exact phrase.
• Political engagement will find results with the word political and the word engagement. Results with the terms in a phrase will appear first, followed by results that have both terms (not in a phrase) and finally, results that have one of the terms.

Note: Quotation marks only work with complete words. Be careful when cutting and pasting phrases into quotation marks. “Political engagement in Cana” will not retrieve “political engagement in Canada”

The ‘Refine results’ option on the left sidebar of the Page 1+ results page offers plenty of search filters to narrow your results list so it is more specific to your search needs. For example, you can limit by:

• Availability – to show results that are:
  • Available online (you can see the full text online now – *note you will have to sign in to the library with your network ID)
  • Print/Physical items (e.g. books that you can borrow)
  • Peer Reviewed Journals (articles from publications that are peer-reviewed, which by default are scholarly.)
  • Published within a certain date range
  • Open access (resources that are free to use online without a student account)
• Publication Date: To view results from within a selected date range
• Resource Type: To view specific types of resources (articles, ebooks, news, etc.)
• Subject: Add suggested search terms to narrow your search even further.

You can select multiple options to narrow your original search results. For example, you can search for scholarly articles published within the last year on education in Ontario. For more information, view our Search Tips in our Research Guide

In addition to your search terms, you can add terms called Boolean operators to your search to help you combine or eliminate search terms. View our tip sheet on Boolean Search Operators for more information.

• AND is the default
  By default, all terms in a search are combined as a phrase first and then combined with the AND operator. If you prefer, you can put AND between the search terms as long as you type it in all caps: politics AND youth.
  • Politics youth will find results that contain the phrase “politics youth” first, followed by results that discuss politics and youth in the same item.
• Use OR to search alternatives and see more results.
  Add OR between search terms to search for results with one term or the other. Don’t forget to capitalize OR. Example: You may also try:
  • voting OR elections will return items that contain either term.
  • “renewable energy” OR “alternative energy”
• Use NOT to exclude words and narrow your search.
  Add NOT between search terms to search for some words and not other related words. Example:
  • pasta NOT spaghetti will find results that do not include the word spaghetti.

Wildcard boolean operators will let you search for multiple variations of a word.

• Use a question mark to search variations for one character.
  Add a question mark (?) in the place in the word that might have a variation. The ? will match any one character. For example:
  • Sm?th will find results for “Smith” or “Smyth”.
• Use an asterisk to search variations of zero or more characters.
  Add an asterisk (*) in the place in the word that might have a variation. The * will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. For example:
  • Dog* will find results for “dog”, “dogs”, “dogged”, “dogma”, “dogwood”, etc. Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.