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Research Skills for Engineering Students

This tutorial supports the development of engineering information literacy skills

Design a better search

Database operators & tools

There are search operators you can use throughout most databases, which help to include and exclude results.

  • The word OR
    • Broadens your search by capturing synonyms or variant spellings of a concept. It means you’re looking for results that have either of the terms.
    • Example: wireless communication OR mobile communication will find results that have either term present
  • The word AND
    • Narrows a search by capturing two or more ideas or concepts. It means you’re looking for results that have both or all of the concepts.
    • Example: bridge AND earthquake will find results that have both terms present
  • Brackets/Parentheses ( ) gather OR’d synonyms of a concept together, while combining them with another concept
    • Example: (earthquake OR seismic) AND liquefaction
  • Quotation marks “ ” narrow your search by finding words together as a phrase, instead of separately
    • Example: “British Columbia” will make sure you find the province of British Columbia, and won’t find other results where the words appear separately
  • In many databases, an asterisk (*) will act as a truncation symbol, which expands your search results to find various endings of a word stem.
    • Example: structur* will find structure, structures, structural, structured…


A good way to brainstorm relevant keywords is through controlled vocabulary or subject headings. They describe what the article is about, and can be found in the detailed view of an article record. The vocabulary or headings make up a list in the database known as a thesaurus. The thesaurus contains synonyms, as well as broader and narrower terms. You’ll see an example of using a thesaurus in part 2 of this module.

Test your knowledge: Compare database and web search results

  1. Conduct the same search in the Compendex Engineering Village database, and the search engine that you normally use

  2. Search for: "Autonomous vehicles" AND "object detection"

  3. Scroll through the top ten results in Compendex and your search engine and notice the different types of resources: journal articles, corporate websites, theses, blogs, conference proceedings, standards...

  4. Add at least one additional keyword or phrase to make your search more specific in both places

  5. Comparing the results side by side should demonstrate the value of searching within Compendex when looking for scholarly engineering sources