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Please note: Off-campus access to many library resources is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Hope Library Guides

CHEM 256b - Organic Chemistry Lab Independent Project: Searching Tips & Tricks

Little Search Tricks

  • use AND when you want search results to meet multiple criteria (ex: be about puppies AND kittens)
  • use OR when you want search results to meet one of several criteria (ex: be about puppies OR kittens (also includes results about both))
  • use NOT to filter out search results you know are irrelevant (ex: drive NOT cars)
  • quotation marks keep phrases together (ex: "piano teacher")
  • asterisks are helpful for searching for all results that have the same root (ex: motivat* will bring up search results for motivation, motivate, and more)

Do We have this Article?

When you find a citation in a database that doesn't have the full text of the article included, look for these links:

full-text options or

Following these links will search our system to see if we have it available somewhere else.  Be patient, sometimes you have to click through several links to get to the article!

Getting Access to Things We Don't Have at Hope: MeLCat and Interlibrary Loan

Don't forget to click the "Expand My Results" button in Primo to see more articles that you can request.

Google Scholar and Van Wylen Library

Google Scholar is an easily accessible gateway to scholarly research articles, many of which Van Wylen Library licenses for use by the Hope College community. To make it even easier to access library resources, we share our library holdings with Google Scholar.

For on-campus users, Google Scholar results includes links to either full text resources (via Full-Text @ Hope College) or links to Request It @ Hope College.  The Request It link provides a quick way to submit interlibrary loan requests for items to which we do not have access, as well as quick access to an email help form (i.e. Report a Problem link).

Following are examples of results from Google Scholar:

If full text is not available, the (double arrow) icon will expand to provide options to request the item (e.g. Request it @ Hope College).

For users off-campus, their Google Scholar settings need to be edited to link to our holdings:

Users need to select the Settings link from the men () at the upper left of the search screen, select Library Links. then type Hope College.  From the resulting list of libraries, please select Hope College Van Wylen Library - Full-Text @ Hope College.

Finding Your Search Results Again

Remember: always save the permalink to your search results not the URL! Permalinks are called a variety of things permanent link/stable URL/etc but are almost always accompanied by a link symbol. Save this link instead of the URL because URLs expire in many library databases.