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When creating search statements, it is best to avoid common words. Generally these words have little intrinsic meaning and appear too frequently in the database to provide meaningful results. Pronouns and prepositions fall into this category. Examples of these kinds of words are I, the, an, for, that, by, about, etc. Some databases will automatically ignore these kinds of words, even if you type them in. These are known as stop words.
When searching subject-specific databases, there may be an additional set of stop words to avoid. These words may appear so frequently in the database, or have such broad meaning, that searching for them doesn't provide meaningful results. Use more specific terms or consult the thesaurus in the database for suggestions.
For example, when searching in a psychology database, it will not be useful to search for the following words, since hundreds of records are likely to show up:
psychology, research, study, experiment, human
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