Quotation marks on a phrase
Use quotation marks to search results that match the whole phrase in the exact order
Example: You can search the full title of a document.
“Building a national child-care system requires a coherent, ambitious approach”

Plus sign connector
Search keywords connected by plus (+) sign if you don’t know the exact search phrase
Example: national child care + coherent + approach

Asterix placeholder
Use asterix (*) to put a placeholder if don’t know the exact search phrase or only have a general idea of what you’re searching for.
Example: You want to search documents that talks about gendered impacts of COVID-19
What you should try: “gendered * of COVID-19”
What you will find: pages that contain “gendered impacts of COVID-19”, “gendered economic impacts of COVID-19”, “gendered dynamics of COVID-19”

Hyphen keyword exclusion
Use hyphen (-) to exclude/omit results that contain certain words
Example: You want to search publications by Martha Friendly that are not “Early childhood education and care in Canada”
Martha Friendly -“Early childhood education and care in Canada”

Filetype
If you are looking for a PDF document, try this: search term filetype:pdf
Example: You want to find a PDF document that talks about neoliberalism.
neoliberalism filetype:pdf

Author last name
If you are looking for a document by the author, try searching the author’s last name because the author’s first name is ellipsed for documents under Research, Policy & Practice (following APA citation style).