 Now that we know how to identify keywords from our research questions, let's learn how to combine them together so our resources, such as the library's online catalog, or a library database, knows how to retrieve the information we want. We call this constructing a search string. A search string is the combination of keywords and search tips that make up the search being conducted. Constructing a search string is what allows us to enter our keywords in a library resource, such as a database, to find the information we want. This video will show you how to develop a basic search string using three search tips. Bullion search operators, quotation marks, and the asterisks or star symbol. These tools can be used across different library resources and will help make sure you are retrieving the most relevant results for your research. Let's start with bullion search operators, which involves using the words and or and not in our search. When writing them in our search string, these words are always written in capital letters. The and bullion search operator combines our terms together and finds information that includes all of those terms. For example, a scholarly article that talks about both city farming and food security. The or bullion search operator allows for searching by synonyms or related terms. It allows you to broaden your search by looking for information that has any of the terms used in your or instruction. For example, searching using the synonyms city farming or city gardening or urban agriculture will return articles about this method using any of these terms that we have included in our search. And finally, the bullion search operator not removes search results you may not need by filtering out specific words. For example, if you are interested in information only about food security in the United States but kept getting articles about food security in Africa, you could write not Africa and it will exclude that information from your results. Next, we have quotation marks. By putting quotation marks around a specific term or search phrase, you'll be able to keep the words together in your search. For example, we might do this to our keyword food security. Truncation involves the use of the asterisk or star symbol and comes at the end of your root word. It's helpful if you are searching with a keyword that might have different endings. For example, using the star symbol at the end of the word teen. Can you think of some variations of the ending of this word that this tip would search for? We would get teen or teens or teenager or teenagers without having to type in each word using the or search operator. So what might our search string look like incorporating these tips? We would use the bullion search operators to connect our keywords together. So first, we'll ask our library resource to search for city farming and then its synonyms, city gardening and urban agriculture. We'll then add our second term food security using the and bullion search operator so that we only get information that is about both city farming or one of its related terms and food security. We'll wrap food security in quotes to search for that specific term and we'll take the root of our keywords farming and gardening and add our star symbol so we can get any variations of the ending of these words. Remember that there's no such thing as a perfect search, but doing the pre-research step of identifying your keywords and applying these search strategies can help you find better results. Research is a strategic process that involves trying different search options to see what returns the best results. We'll continue to see these search strategies and tips at work in Highway 301, finding information.