Nesting
Nesting is an advance search strategy that allows you to combine multiple search terms together and utilize boolean operators and wildcards. Called nesting because parenthesis are often used to group main concepts together.
Continuing with the example of global environmental protection, a comprehensive search statement would include each of the major concepts of the topic as well as the related terms (synonyms) that you've identified.
A possible nested search statement could be:
(global
OR international OR multinational OR worldwide)
AND
(environment OR ecology)
AND
(protect? OR conserv? OR regulat?)
How the search engine searches (general representation*):
- Each group of terms and any variant spellings in parentheses is searched first
- Then the search engine narrows the search by combining these searches
*Each database's search engine searches differently so results may vary.