Research Guide: Tips for GALILEO

Because GALILEO aggregates many different types of materials (newspapers, journals, magazines, videos, photographs, statistics, etc), it's the most comprehensive way to search for academic journal articles.

However, many of its materials are not scholarly, peer-reviewed resources, so you'll need to be careful when choosing which resources to reference in your research papers.

Quotation Marks

Use quotation marks to turn words into phrases. For example, searching for either "working mothers" or "common core" will only give you search results where the two words are used together as a phrase. When you search these words without the quotation marks, your results will show one word or the other, and sometimes both together, so using quotation marks guarantees that both of your search terms will be in the articles in your results list.

Asterisks

In most, but not all, databases, using an asterisk at the end of a word will search for all variations of that word. For example, searching for "educational strategy*" will give you search results containing either "educational strategies" or "educational strategy," as well as other variations of the phrase.

• Limit your search results to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals. This will only give you peer-reviewed publications that you have immediate full text access to.
  • If you want to search for articles that you don't have immediate access to, then you can fill out an Interlibrary Loan Request and potentially borrow a copy from another library.
• Take note of the suggested search terms that appear as you begin typing in the search bar. These key words and phrases may be useful if you need ideas for additional searches.
• Use the search limiters on the left-hand side of the screen after you do a search. It's helpful to filter by Subject, Limit by Type, or use the Publication Date slider to filter out results that aren't relevant to your needs.
• When you click on the title of an article, the record page will open, showing you the article's bibliographic information: such as journal title, author(s), and publication date. You'll need this information for your paper's Works Cited or References page.
• You can also use the Tools on the right-hand side of the screen. These will let you Cite, E-mail, Print, and Save.

Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) give you more control over your search results by narrowing or broadening your search results. You can find these operators in the Advanced Search section of GALILEO.

AND

The word AND will limit your search results by combining two or more key terms or phrases. For example, searching for "Global Warming" AND "Climate Change" will decrease your number of search results by only giving you the results that include both phrases.

OR

The word OR can be used to expand your search results by including terms that are used interchangeably. For example, the words Adolescent and Teenager are synonyms. Searching for Adolescent OR Teenager will increase your number of search results by giving you results that include either one term or the other--or even both terms.

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NOT

The word NOT will exclude certain terms from your search. For example, searching for "Gap Year" NOT Britain will decrease your number of search results by not including results that talk about Britain.