Research guides: Industrial Relations & Human Resources Library : Public Sector Unionism

Public Sector Unionism Research Jumpstart

Searching for library resources

Creating Search Statements

Use Boolean Operators and Search Modifiers to narrow down search results to the key terms attached to a library record.

Boolean Operators	Search Modifiers
Use AND between terms to return results that contain all of the terms. Term1 AND Term2 Use OR between terms to return results that contain any of the terms. Term1 OR Term2 Use NOT to eliminate any results that contain that term. (Term1 AND Term2) NOT “Term3”	Use parentheses to group search terms (Term1 AND Term2) OR (Term3 AND Term4) Use quotations for exact phrases (Term1 OR Term2) AND “Term3” Use asterisk to return results that contain the start of the term word. Ter*

Learn more here: Develop a Search Strategy

Searching Pro Tips

Pro Tip #1: An Everything search within LibrarySearch will return results for the term in any field within the item record. Use the Advance Search to interchange terms between Any Field, Title, and Subject to return additional results.

Pro Tip #2: Refine your results using filters.

Pro Tip #3: Use the same search string within different article database to find more results! Check out our list of IR/HR Databases to get started.

Search term synonyms

Try different terms and keywords to express your concepts. The chart below shows related words and phrases for this topic that can be used as search terms:

Term 1 =	Term 2 =
public sector	union
government	collective bargain*

Can you think of more terms? Add more terms to your search based on your specific research question, and check out How do I choose good keywords? for more advice. Have suggestions for this synonym chart? Let us know at cirhr.lirbary@utoronto.ca

An example search statement:

("public sector" OR "government") AND (union OR collective bargain*)