You can also use Boolean Operators like AND, OR, or NOT to broaden or narrow your search results. (Make sure that the AND, OR, or NOT operator are in all caps.)

For example:

• housing AND Pennsylvania
  • Results would include any items that mention ALL: housing and Pennsylvania. Each new concept added with an AND narrows down your potential results.
• homeless OR unhoused OR unsheltered
  • Results would include any items that mention homeless, unhoused, or unsheltered, but not necessarily more than one. This is a broader search than an AND search. It's useful if there are terms that might be used somewhat interchangeably. You would find more results with this kind of search, but they may be less relevant to your topic, depending on your topic.
• "affordable housing" NOT rentals
  • Results would include any items that mention the first term, "affordable housing", but do not mention the second term, rentals. NOT searches are helpful if there is a similar but unrelated topic to your search. Using NOT can help you cut down on the number of irrelevant results, but sometimes it can be too narrow.

Use Quotation Marks to search for short phrases.

For example: "affordable housing"

The use of the quotation marks will prevent the database from searching for these words separately. This way, you will avoid results where "affordable" is used in one paragraph and "housing" is used a few paragraphs later, but they are not used together as a phrase. Instead, all results will contain the phrase affordable housing.

When using quotation marks, it's important that you spell your terms correctly and that you keep the words inside the quotation marks to a minimum -- the database will search for exactly what you've typed as you've typed it. 

You can also search Google and Google Scholar for only specific types of websites (such as .gov, .org, or .edu)

When searching Google for only government website results, include site:gov

• Example: searching for homelessness site:gov, all Google results are from government websites

Interlibrary Loan

If you find a citation for an article that University Libraries does not have access to, you can request it via the Libraries' Interlibrary Loan service. This is a free service but it may take up to a week (or in some rare cases, even longer) to receive your requested article via email.