- Use ORs and parentheses to combine synonyms or multiple topics
- (oil OR petroleum OR crude)
- (antibiotic OR antiviral)
- (woman OR girl OR female)
- Truncate roots of important words to find plurals and more
- perform* (searches for perform, performance, performativity, etc.)
- cell$
- pregnan!
- Insert a wild card symbol to catch words with different spellings
- wom?n
- coloni#ation
- colo$r
*Truncation and wild cards work differently in different databases. Check the help section of the database to learn what symbol to use and how to properly use it.