Keywords
Databases and search engines don’t use natural language like we do - we know this from basic Google searches.
We could do a Google search like this:
However, it's more efficient to do a search like this:
What you’re doing when you shorten your question like that is distilling it down to the key concepts or “keywords”.
Wildcards!
In many databases, you can use a wildcard character to retrieve results of all words that start with the letters before the wildcard. Often, this character is *.
So when searching for "pollinat*", you will get results for: pollination, pollinators, and pollinating.
AND / OR / NOT
Created by the University of Wisconsin Whitewater.