Brainstorm synonyms for your topic.
Come up with a list to help expand your searching options.
If your topic is college students, you may also search for undergraduates, freshman, and also related terms like: higher education and universities.
Use the Boolean search operators: and, or, not, near.
AND Reduces the number of search results by requiring more than one term to appear in the same article. (i.e., foster care and aging out)
OR Expands the number of search results by expanding the possible matches to include either one or the other term. (i.e., teen or adolescent)
NOT Reduces search results to omit references to articles with certain words that have nothing to do with your topic. (i.e., pets not dogs)
Put it all together to make a sophisticated search:
"transition housing" and "foster care" and teen*
Truncation
Use the asterisk (*) to find various word endings
Searching for child* will return:
Quotations
Use quotes around multi-word concepts:
Facets, these are located on the left side in OneSearch and next to your search results
These can help refine your search
Sort- by relevance is default, but you can change to other options like Date-newest
Availability- this is where you can select to search for Peer-review Journals, Full-text online (easy online access), Open Access (not behind a paywall), and Held by library
Subject - this can be a great source for synonyms
Date- easy way to get a specific date range, like last 10 years
and more!
To utilize the full potential of Google Scholar linked it to Meriam Library. By doing this you can then see if the library has the items that you want (Find It @ Chico) which will link to OneSearch.
To link Google Scholar to the Meriam Library OneSearch follow these steps: