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SearchBox

A guide to SearchBox, the search engine that provides a single starting point to find and access the University Libraries' e-resources.

Questions about SearchBox?

Ask the Information Desk for help with searching and managing your results. Call (202) 319-5070 or stop by the Information Desk on the first floor in Mullen Library.

If you have a question about searching for resources in a specific field, you can also make an appointment with a liaison librarian in your area. Not sure who that is? Check the liaison librarians directory.

Simple Search Operators

SearchBox (and many other databases!) allow more detailed simple searches with the following operators: AND, OR, and NOT (sometimes called Boolean operators).

Another search operator is "quotation marks" - surrounding a phrase in quotation marks will search for that exact phrase, not the keywords within it. You can also use (parentheses) to group terms together. This is useful if you are using multiple Boolean operators. For example:

Image of search bar with the following text: Shakespeare AND (tragedy OR sonnet) Image of search bar with the following text: (Shakespeare AND tragedy) or sonnet

Other search operators are used for truncation or wildcard characters.

  • Truncation: cultur* searches for culture, cultural, culturally, and other words that match the characters after the asterisk.
  • Wildcard: wom?n searches for woman, women, and even variants like womyn and womxn.
  • Using a question mark wildcard only replaces one character; truncating using an asterisk can replace any number of characters.

This overview of basic search adapted from ExLibris Knowledge Center End User documentation.

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