When searching the catalog to find books, or databases to find articles, you need a special kind of logic called Boolean. To use this type of logic to create advanced searches, we use ANDs and ORs. Doing this connects keywords that an author or cataloger might use when describing a book, journal, or article. You may have to use synonyms, as different people use different words to describe the same thing.
AND indicates that you want both keywords or phrases in the search query to appear in the description of each book or article you find. Using AND will limit your search and retrieve less articles since it will only retrieve articles with both keywords.
EX: Beyonce AND Grammys
OR indicates you will accept results that include either one keyword or phrase OR another. OR will give you more results.
EX: Oscars OR Academy Awards
We can use several Boolean operators in the same search. It is good practice to use parentheses to group synonyms for the same concept. This ensures that the database finds all the articles about each concept first, and then finds an item with one word for each of the concepts described. The use of parentheses in searches is called nesting.
EX: (Oscars OR Academy awards) AND "World War II"
Truncation is a way to search for all the words with the same root.
EX: child* will search for: child, children, childhood, childless, etc.
EX: educat* will search for: educate, educating, education, educational, etc.
NOT helps you to exclude irrelevant results from your search that might come up if your keywords have multiple meanings or are related to topics you want to avoid.
EX: Oscars AND Will Smith NOT Slap
"Taylor Swift" AND (music OR "music industry") AND (re-record OR version OR "Taylor's version")
friend* AND "social media" AND (anxiety or "anxiety disorder")
Venn diagrams can help you picture how Boolean searching works in databases. Flip through the slideshow below to see what information different searches would come up with.
EX: Beyoncé AND Jay-Z
This search would pull all sources that mention both Beyoncé and Jay-Z
EX: Beyoncé OR Jay-Z
This search would pull all sources that mention either Beyoncé, or Jay-Z, or both of them.
EX: Beyoncé NOT Jay-Z
This search would pull up all sources that mention only Beyoncé and no sources that mention Jay-Z, even if those results also mention Beyoncé.
EX: Beyoncé AND "Destiny's Child" NOT Jay-Z
This search would pull up sources that mention both Beyoncé and Destiny's Child and no sources that mention Jay-Z.
EX: (Beyoncé OR Destiny's Child) AND Music
This search would pull up results that mention either Beyoncé or Destiny's Child and music.
Carlyle Campbell Library
Meredith College
3800 Hillsborough St.
Raleigh, NC 27607
919-760-8532
