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- When using Discover@UMSL, you should avoid typing full questions—such as “What are the effects of marijuana on academic performance?” Instead, only type a few key words—such as marijuana academic performance.
- Since we’re looking specifically for articles about academic performance and not articles where the words academic and performance are used separately, we can search for the exact phrase by enclosing it in quotation marks—marijuana “academic performance”. Be careful though: Specifying this exact phrase may eliminate articles that instead use the term academic achievement.
- Discover@UMSL and most library databases combine words and phrases with Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT). As you can see from the diagram below, AND will reduce the number of results and OR will expand the number of results.
- AND should be used to connect components of your search that don’t have an explicit relationship, such as marijuana and academic achievement. AND is usually the default operator, so marijuana “academic performance” is actually seen by the search engine as marijuana AND “academic performance”.
- OR should be used to connect related terms, and you’ll want to enclose these terms within parentheses; e.g., (marijuana OR cannabis) AND (“academic performance” OR “academic achievement” OR “grade point average”).
- It’s usually best to avoid using NOT since it may exclude articles that mention your term but aren’t focused on it.
