By topic

Library Search

Use Library Search to discover resources by topic across the majority of Library resources. Library Search covers print and electronic books, articles, e-journals, newspapers, theses and more.

Simple keyword searching is one approach. Results are ranked by relevancy to your search terms. The ranking combined with the Topic facet in the right side-bar is often sufficient to discover suitable information resources on your topic.

Advanced Search offers more control. You can choose to look for keywords in a subject field. This field contains headings assigned by cataloguers describing what the resource is about. The title is also a good choice, though not all titles are descriptive of the work itself.

Topics Facet

Use the topic facet in the right side-bar of Library Search to refine your search results.

Screenshot of filtering in the topic facet

Include & exclude topics.

Under the topic facet, Library Search provides options to include or exclude terms from your search results. Your selections are shown at the top of the side-bar so you can modify your choices as you review the results.

Advanced Search

In the advanced search you can choose which fields to search. This is much more specific than keywords anywhere. The "subject" field is a great choice for topics, but "title" is also good.

Complex searches

Both Simple and Advanced searches support Boolean operators, wildcards and parentheses when you want to be very specific.

Operators & special characters	Action in Library Search	See the results
AND	includes a word or phrase	shakespeare AND tragedies
NOT	excludes a word or phrase	digits NOT fingers
OR	includes alternatives or synonyms	diversity OR inclusion
()	group search terms	(diversity OR inclusion) NOT biodiversity (poetry OR sonnet) AND Shakespeare
?	single character wildcard finds variation in spelling. For example, to include results containing woman or women	forem?n
*	multiple character wildcard finds variations in spelling where more than one character varies. For example, to include results containing culture or cultural or culturally	cultur*
""	retrieves the words between the quotation marks as an exact phrase. The words are adjacent and in the same order. Do not use a wildcard in a phrase. Use for a more specific set of results.	"Mexican walking fish"
&	treats this as if you had entered AND. A search for obstetrics & gynecology will retrieve titles such as "Obstetrics and gynecology"	"anatomy & physiology"
$, @, etc	characters are automatically removed from exact title searches

If you use multiple operators (AND, OR, NOT), they are treated with left-to-right precedence unless you also use brackets to group search terms.

Library Research guides

Library Research Guides provide summaries of the best resources for the various disciplines studied at Bond. Resources include journal databases and other specialised resources.

Study areas

Search and find library resources