Crunch Time Clinic

Use Boolean operators to improve your search strategy!

• They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
• The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.

Why use Boolean operators?

• To focus a search, particularly when your topic contains multiple search terms.
• To connect various pieces of information to find exactly what you're looking for.
• Example: college AND test anxiety

Use OR in a search to:

• connect two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
• broaden your results, telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records
• example: capital punishment OR death penalty

Use NOT in a search to:

• exclude words from your search
• narrow your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms
• example: education NOT standardized testing
   

Truncation

Truncation — a symbol added to the end of the root of a word to instruct the database to search for all forms of a word. The asterisk (*) is used in many databases for truncation. Example: adolescen* retrieves adolescent, adolescents, or adolescence