![]() This post was written by Katie Holmes on September 21st, 2017. Note: This blog post was adapted from a prior blog post on Boolean operators, developed by Heather Campbell. Even Google uses them without you even knowing it! Knowing how Boolean Operators work (and having some other strategies to use) is a helpful skill, whether you’re searching in academic databases, on government websites, or in the catalogue. To find more strategies like the ones above, you can pick up a hand-out on Boolean Operators and Search Limits at the library.So, for the word ‘diabetes’, you might put diabet* – this will allow for endings including diabetes, diabetics, and diabetic to show up in the catalogue. You might also consider using truncation! To ‘truncate’ a word, you replace the ending of a word with an asterisk (*) to allow for multiple endings.Other examples: “diet therapy”, “early modern drama”. “diabetes mellitus” and “Shakespearean drama” are meant to be found as a unit rather than two separate words), you can combine them with quotation marks. Since the above searches both involve multiple words that are meant to be found together (e.g.(Satire OR parody) AND (Shakespearean drama OR Early modern drama). ![]() “ AND” Examples (when you want to tell the database to give you results with both terms)Ĭombination Example (when you want to develop a specific, targeted search) Shakespearean drama OR Early modern drama.“ OR” Examples (when you want to tell the database to give you results with either term) (diabetes mellitus OR type two diabetes) AND (diet OR nutrition therapy) Here’s an example of “and” using the library catalogue: diabetes mellitus AND nutrition therapy.“ AND” Examples (when you want to tell the database to give you results with both terms): “ OR” Examples (when you want to tell the database to give you results with either term): AND also narrows your search: use a few AND words if you’re getting too many results. We use AND to combine the different concepts from our topic. OR also broadens your search: use different OR words if you aren’t getting enough search results. We use OR to combine the synonyms that we came up with (because we don’t care which word appears in the text). One of the alternative treatments is managing diabetes with your diet. Using the Boolean method, searches for research information can be simple or complex depending on the type of information and the detail desired. A mathematician who created the method for symbolic logic. “ AND” and “ OR”) rather than just typing random words like in Google.įor this post, we’ll use the same example from the keywords blog post: I need to find information on the benefits of alternative treatments for type two diabetes (i.e. Search Strategy with Boolean Method The Boolean method ofsearching began with George Boole (18151864). Many databases require that you combine your keywords using Boolean operators (i.e. It’s impossible to get the most out of your search results without combining keywords with Boolean Operators and other search strategies – make sure to read both blog posts! Reviewed and links updated in January 2020.
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