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How to Search with Keywords

Your keywords are the main concepts or ideas of your paper. 

Shows how Boolean works (Synonyms with OR between them) AND (Synonyms)

For example the keywords for a paper on “youth employment in Canada” would be:

  • Youth
  • Employment
  • Canada

 

Use synonyms: Often there are multiple ways to express the same concept. For example these synonyms mean essentially the same thing – make sure to use them:

employment can also be:

  • job
  • work
  • career

Use “AND” and “OR”: By bridging your truncated keywords and synonyms with the capitalized search words “AND” and “OR” (known as Boolean operators), you can search for multiple concepts effectively.

 

We Have More information on Search Techniques 

 

 

Field Search within Subject Databases

Use Field search to limit to relevant topics. 

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly and peer reviewed literature. From one search box, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites

Coverage of topics in Google Scholar varies from discipline to discipline as many journal publishers do not allow Google to index their articles; in many cases searching subject specific databases will result in a better choice of articles.

If you are searching with Google Scholar on-campus you will automatically be given access to articles for which TMU has a subscription.  If you are using Google Scholar off-campus, you will need to configure Google Scholar to get access to those articles.

Google Scholar Chrome Extension

""Chrome users can install the Google Scholar Button to make finding articles and formating citations easy.  You can use it to:

  • Find full text of articles
  • Re-do your web search on Google Scholar
  • Format references in APA, MLA or Chicago style and copy them into your paper.

To take full advantage of the Google Scholar Button when off-campus, remember to configure your Google Scholar settings so that it knows you are from TMU and provides access to TMU subscribed resources.

Configuing Google Scholar for Off-Campus Use

For Google Scholar to know that you are affiliated with TMU (and that you should have access to TMU resources), you will need to configure your Google Scholar Preferences as follows:

  1. Go to scholar.google.ca and click on the Three bar (hamburger) menu (upper left) 
  2. Click on Settings
  3. Choose Library Links from the left-hand menu
  4. Enter Toronto Metropolitan University in the search box
  5. Click in the box beside Toronto Metropolitan University - Check TMU Libraries
  6. Scroll down and click on the Save Preferences button

Once configured, you will see Check TMU Libraries links when you search Google Scholar and you will have access to all TMU's subscription resources.