AND is the most useful connector and helps you narrow down searches to the most relevant information.
OR will make your search results larger, but it is useful for finding synonyms when you aren't sure which term an author has used. (teen OR adolescent) (male OR men)
NOT isn't used often, but sometimes it can be useful to remove unwanted items from your search results. (Dolphins AND intelligence NOT football)
Most databases allow you to filter your searches so that you can more easily get to a bunch of documents that fit your need. Some common ways to narrow a search is by:
and many more.
Databases don't have a standardized location for the filtering options, but they are usually available on the search results page.
Any search term that has multiple words should be entered in quotation marks. When you use quotation marks around the phrase, the search results will have those words adjacent to each other in that order. This will help the researcher find relevant results more quickly.
The only difference between S1 (search one) and S2 (search two) is the use of quotation marks. By using the quotation marks around the search phrases of "college students" and "time management" the researcher has less than one-fifth of the search results and they should be more relevant to you.
Most databases have a standardized format for the information that describes the source. A lot of students search by keyword, which is the broadest search that will retrieve the highest number of results. High numbers of search results generally lack precision. It's the old "quality versus quantity" debate. When searching for information or for sources, it is to the researcher's advantage to maximize quality. This is just one way of many to do get more precise results.
In this search, each result must have the phrase "college student" as a subject and the phrase "time management" in the title. This search finds 53 results compared to over 450 results if the fields for the search terms aren't designated.
Sometimes it is useful to truncate, or cut off, words rather than type in all the variations of the word. In most databases, the asterisk is the symbol used to signal that any form of the root word is an acceptable term to match.
child* will retrieve child and child's, but also children and childhood.
manage* will retrieve manage and manages, but also manager, managers, managerial and management.
Many databases display search results based on its RELEVANCE to your search. This is based on how frequently your search terms appear in the article description. Sometimes you can re-sort your results by how recently it was published or alphabetically based on author or title.