Less is more: stop words (2/14)

When searching for known titles – i.e. when conducting a citation search as described in chapter 2 – many databases make your task easier: they are programmed to ignore commonly used words that carry no relevance to content. These include “and” or articles “a, an, the” - the so-called “stop words”. It will usually suffice to enter only a couple of words from the title into a search field. Also, the fewer words you enter, the lower the chances are you make a typo or a spelling mistake. Databases also pay no attention to whether you use capital letters at the beginnings of names in your search query.

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