MHA 603 & HOA 703: Human Resources Management in the Hospitality Industry: Finding Articles

Database Search Strategies

This is a tool for searching across a variety of quality information, including books, journal articles, and multimedia held by UNLV Libraries. It's a good place to begin research on a topic.

Phrase Searching:

Exact phrase searching with the use of “ ”. The query “teacher education” will find results with that exact phrase.

Searching Specific Fields

The single search box (basic search box or keyword search box in advanced search) will search across many fields automatically. For example, entering an ISBN, ISSN, or Call Number will bring back associated records.

You can explicitly search a field using the syntax: “field:(query).” For example, the search ISSN:(1234-5678) finds records that contain that value in the ISSN field.

Searchable fields:

• Title

• SubjectTerms

• Author

• Publisher

• PublicationTitle

• Volume

• Issue

• Language

• Notes

• ISBN

• ISSN

• DOI

• DEWEY

Boolean Operators:

You can search with using these operations: OR, NOT and AND. The operators must be written in ALL CAPS.

By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator. To expand the results set, use the OR operator “microcircuits OR nanocircuits” will return items that contain either term.

This can be combined with quoted terms such as “teacher education” OR “educator training”.

To exclude items, use the NOT operator or “-” character before a term. When used in the following query “animal NOT dog” the results will not include the term “dog”.

Wildcard Use in Summon:

Use the wildcards “?” and “*”.

The question mark (?) will match any one character and can be used to find “Olsen” or “Olson” by searching for Ols?n

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. A search for Ch*ter would match “Charter”, “Character”, and “Chapter”. When used at the end of a word, such as Temp* it will match all suffixes “Temptation”, “Temple” and “Temporary”.

Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.