Guide to Research and Writing for the Academic Study of Religion

Nesting allows you to be more specific about the relations between your keywords. For instance, if you wanted to search for sources on Hindu-Muslim relations, knowing records may be under the keywords Muslim or Islam, you could enter your search as Hinduism AND (Islam OR Muslim). This indicates that as concepts, Islam and Muslim are interchangeable, and that the word Hinduism must be present along with either Islam or Muslim for the record to be retrieved.

Other Examples:

• (veil$ OR head covering) AND (Islam$ OR Muslim$)