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Santa Clara UniversityUniversity Library

ENGL 181: Engineering Communications

What every engineering student needs to know to do research and writing for ENGL 181--whether it is for a class project or for your senior design theses. Learn to do research by applying the engineering design process.

Searching Tips

Use the following techniques to find more relevant resources. They can be used in nearly all of our databases. 

  • Keyword/Phrase Searching
    • Use only the major words in your subject when searching. Many databases delete what are called STOP WORDS - words that don't add meaning to the search, such as The, Of, A, And, When, What, etc.
    • When searching for a specific phrase or title, use Quotation Marks around the phrase: "cloud computing", "data centers", etc.
  • Boolean Operators
    • AND - brings up results that include ALL terms
    • OR - brings up results that include EITHER of the terms 
    • NOT - removes results that include the term after NOT
  • Truncation
    • When you are searching for a word that may have multiple endings or would have plural forms, use a Truncation symbol (usually the *) to make sure you are able to get all the results: Cloud Comput* -> Cloud Computing, Cloud Computers, Cloud Computations, etc. 
    • Note that some databases already do this automatically so you may not need to do so. 

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