The University Library offers a large number of search options for literature research in catalogues, subject databases, search engines and many other search services.
On this page we present general search tips to help you with your research in most search engines, subject databases, library catalogues and other search services.
If you get stuck with your search, the reference staff at the service desk of the Library Service Centre (BDZ) will also help you personally on site with using Catalogue.plus or with searching in subject databases and search engines.
If the spelling of a term is not clear to you or if you want to find a term in different spellings / forms / languages at the same time, use wildcards. The asterisk (*) often replaces any number of characters, the question mark (?) exactly one character.
In some search services, wildcards cannot be used at all, or can only be used at the end of a word, or only the asterisk can be used and not the question mark. As a rule, you cannot use wildcards at the beginning of a word.
Many search services - especially search engines like Google - use fuzzy search by default. When you enter a search term, "similar" search terms are also found by comparing them with dictionaries, other users' searches or by using AI. It automatically corrects spelling mistakes, adds wildcards, and looks for other word forms (plural, genitive, etc.).
Depending on the search service, fuzzy search can be turned off in different ways: Either by putting quotation marks around the words or a + in front of the word, or by selecting special search fields or ticking a checkbox ("exact search"). Fuzzy search services often do not allow you to use wildcards, or you acciddently turn off the automatic search for word forms by setting an asterisk, which will return even fewer hits than without wildcards.
Some search services allow you to specify that you also want to find similar search terms by typing a character in front or after a word. For example, in our library catalogue, if you enter house~ (the ~ at the end is a tilde), you will also find titles that contain the words houses or home in addition to the word house.
There are several ways to combine several search terms within one search field or terms in different search fields. Many databases offer the following options:
Use the word AND (in capitals), the plus sign or simply the space bar to get hits that contain all search terms.
If you use space bar, usually the hits will be displayed first where all search terms occur and then those that contain only some or one of the entered search terms.
Use quotation marks to get only hits where the search terms appear directly next to each other (in a specific order).
Use the word OR (in capitals) or the brackets (...) to get hits with either one or the other (or both) search terms.
Since the search range is greatly expanded with an OR operation, you will often find a large number of hits. Therefore it is useful to add another term to the search, which must occur (AND or phrase).
Note here whether and how a search engine combines the terms, because the search for film AND star OR stern could also be interpreted by a search engine as searching for the terms film and star or for the single term star.
Use the word NOT (in capitals) or the minus sign to get only hits that include the first search term but not the second.
Note that some search engines do not consider the word NOT as "exclude terms" and instead search for the German word "Not".
Please also note that you can use NOT to exclude pages that actually match your search query. A page with the title "This is about Star Wars not Star Trek" would still not be found with the search for star -trek because the word trek appears on the page.