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Research Strategies

An introduction for CWU students new to research at the University level.

Welcome to OneSearch

What is OneSearch?

OneSearch is a single search interface that allows patrons to simultaneously search several article databases, catalogs, and other data sources for books, journal articles, videos, scores, maps, and more! This catalog is shared by members of the Orbis Cascade Alliance (Summit), a consortium of 37 academic libraries across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. OneSearch contains millions of resources.

OneSearch

OneSearch

OneSearch Tutorial

For more information about using OneSearch visit the Using OneSearch Resource Guide.

Search Operators

Search operators help clarify, narrow, or broaden a search. Here are tips for using them in your searches:

Quotes: ''____''

Using quotes looks for specific phrasing of words. Quotes can be very useful for searching titles. For example, searching for "The Color Purple" looks for instances where those words are next to each other.

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

These narrow or broaden a search. Using all-caps in OneSearch is important; you'll get different results by using lowercase.

Puppy AND Kitten  --- Returns instances where both "puppy" and "kitten" are mentioned in the record

Puppy OR Kitten  --- Returns instances where either "puppy" or "kitten" are mentioned in the record

Puppy NOT Kitten --- Returns instances of the word "puppy", but not where "kitten" is included in the record

Image is decorative / repeats information from text

Created by the librarians at Northwest Arkansas Community College Library. See their guide for other search hacks: http://library.nwacc.edu/search-hacks/home

Wildcards: ?, *

Wildcards can be used to allow for multiple characters in a word. You use a wildcard operator to replace a character in a word, or a word ending.
 
Single character wildcards: ?

Example: wom?n = women or woman

Multi-character wildcards: *

Example: explain* = explained, explaining, explains