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When you search a database like the library catalog or one of our subscription article
databases, it is important to use language the database understands. Typing in long research
questions or topics may not lead to the results you expect. Remember, when you search these
resources, you are matching your keywords against records of books, articles, and other
items, not the text itself. And these databases are programmed to understand certain connecting
words. Think of it as the good grammar of searching!
The most important thing is to start with two or three good keywords from your topic
and to connect them with AND, OR, and NOT.
These are known as Boolean connectors or operators, after mathematician George Boole who first
explained the concept this way.
When you connect two keywords with AND, you will find all records in the database that
have BOTH words, as in this example for: "Hip Hop" AND Rap.
Think about AND connecting distinct concepts.
If you connect two keywords with OR, you will find all records with EITHER or BOTH words.
Note that OR will expand your results in comparison with AND.
Think of OR as connecting synonyms or related terms, as in these examples.
If you connect your keywords with NOT, you will exclude the second word.
Use NOT (or AND NOT in the library catalog) only in situations where you know you can
safely exclude the second word.
As you see from some of these examples, I have put several two-word phrases in quotes
to make sure that the words are searched together in that order. You can use quotes for exact
phrases in the library catalog, article databases, and even on Google, and it will help you to
get more precise results.
If you are combining three or more keywords with both AND and OR, you can group part of
the search by using parentheses, a technique called nesting. Let's say you were doing a
paper on hip hop lyrics and wanted to account for the synonymous use of hip hop and rap.
You could construct the search this way:
Note I'm using quotes around "Hip Hop," "Or," "Rap," then I close parentheses, "And" connector
and then "lyrics." There we have the search.
The word" lyrics," though usually used in the plural form, could make sense as "lyric"
as well. If you want to account for both singular and plural forms of a word, or find different
endings for the same stem, you can use a truncation symbol. In the library catalog it is an asterisk
put at the end of the stem of the word, in place of the "s" here. And this searches both
"lyric" and "lyrics."
A similar technique is called a wild card, which uses a symbol to replace letters that
change in the middle of a word. If your topic was "Hip hop and Women" and you wanted to
account for both woman and women, you could form your search like this: w-o-m-?-n.
The ? is the symbol used in the library catalog. The symbols for truncation and wild cards
vary among the different databases, so check the help screens to find out what to use.
To sum up, remember these simple ways to improve your keyword searching:
Choose two or three good keywords and connect them with AND, OR, and NOT as appropriate.
Put exact phrases in quotes.
Use nesting in situations where you need to combine AND and OR in one search phrase.
Use truncation and wildcard symbols to search more than one form of a word, such as singular
and plural forms.
With a little practice, you'll find that these strategies will help you to navigate our databases
even more effectively. If you have questions about search strategies, please,
Ask a Librarian!