Databases

Databases respond well to the following search techniques:

• Use search terms (e.g. important words or phases), not sentences or questions.

• Combine search terms using search operators (AND, OR, NOT), e.g. sole trader AND legal obligations.

• Use truncation (* = substitute for any number of characters) to broaden the scope of your search (e.g. searching for market* will return results with market, markets, marketing etc.).

• Use phrase search (search for a phrase in speech marks, “…”) if searching for a stable expression, particularly specific terminology or spelling (e.g. searching for “social media marketing” will ignore any results where these three words are not together).

Databases contain lots of information and searches usually retrieve many results. You may wish to reduce the number of results by refining your search.  Below is an example of how to refine search results: 

• Enter your search terms. Think carefully about which words you use as this will affect the results you retrieve (synonyms, alternative spellings etc.).

• We recommend restricting your search to full-text documents and altering the date range. 

• You may wish to further limit your results by publication.

Remember, all databases will look different because they have different user interfaces, but you search them all in a similar way.