Image Credit. An illustration of the effect of using Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT on the concepts PIE, CAKE, and ICE CREAM. Author Gary Dorman Wiggins. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
When searching databases, use the word AND between your keywords.
Example: "capital punishment" AND racism
If you have two similar terms, use the word OR.
Example: "capital punishment" OR "death penalty" and racism
If you want to exclude a topic use the word NOT. Let's say you are getting too many results about Texas.
Example: "capital punishment" OR "death penalty" AND racism NOT Texas
Struggling to identify #keywords based on your #topic?
Which words would you #hashtag if it was a #social network feed?
Use quotation marks to search for two or more words together.
With quotation marks. "Capital Punishment" = database will search for the word capital next to the word punishment:
Example: Capital punishment is illegal in many countries.
Without quotation marks. Capital Punishment = database will search for the word capital and the word punishment anywhere in the document.
Example: In the capital of China, Beijing, the punishment for speaking out against the government can be very severe.
Recommendation: Search with quotation marks and then search again without them, since this technique can sometimes backfire.
Look on the left-hand side for ways to limit your search to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed Journals).
Note: You can limit by date, too!
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