When searching the databases for articles, do not type in whole sentences. Instead, determine the main ideas of your topic which will serve as your search terms (also called keywords)
The sources under getting started (and your textbook) are good place to determine keywords
If my topic is Christianity in medieval England and it's relationship with royalty then my keywords are:
Christianity
Medieval
England
Royalty
After developing your keywords think of any synonyms and related terms for each. This will help expand your search for relevant information
Related terms for Christianity: Religion, Catholicism
Related terms for Medieval: Middle Ages
Related terms for Royalty: Crown, King
Most databases (including the library's 'search everything' have an Advance Search Option. Advance search provides more options than a one box basic search. Here's how I'd search my keywords from above using advance search in the Historical Abstracts database
The Search above had four sets of keywords so the search resulted in 22 results. This is because there is an AND operator between them. OR operators expand our results while AND operators look for articles that have all the words between the AND. If you have just a couple of keywords then often searches will produce over 100 or 1000 results, When this happens you need to filter (or as some database call it limit) your results. There are few ways to do this
1) Filter by subject - Subjects act like keywords so select any subjects that match your keywords
2) Filter by time period: Some databases, such as Historical Abstracts, will let you filter by the by a historical time period. This means you can limit to what time period the article is focusing on (this doesn't limit to when the article is publish, which is a date of publication filter)
