Combining Keywords and Search Terms

Learning how to combine keywords and search terms is essential to getting relevant search results from a library database. We use words called Boolean operators to combine search terms in a database. The three main Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT. Note in the examples below that we can usually find and change the Boolean operator in our search by using the pull down menu in a database. We can also type Boolean operators in the search bar. 

The following examples come from Highline College Library's One Search tool, which allows us to:

• Search many databases at one time
• Find different types of sources such as print books, electronic books, streaming videos, and articles from magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals.

 

AND 

Use AND between search terms when you have different concepts you want to combine. AND means that all search terms must be present in the search. AND can help us narrow our search when we have too many search results.

Note that the drop-down menu to the left of the search boxes contains the Boolean operator AND. This is usually the default.

The above example shows that combining the terms gender neutral and restrooms will find search results that contain both of these search terms. Notice the total number of search results is 2,769.

 

Also Try Different Search Terms

Now we'll see what happens when we change our keywords in the One Search tool:

Using the keyword toilet instead of restrooms and gender instead of gender neutral increased the search results by thousands to 28,335! This is why it's important to always experiment with a number of different search terms. 

 

OR 

If we don't know which search term is the best so we want to include them all, OR is a good option. Use OR between synonyms (words that mean the same thing or are similar). Use OR to broaden the search. OR can help us when we need more search results. 

Note that in this example, we've typed the Boolean operator OR in the search box.

Compare the search above with the first one on this page, which gave us 2,769 search results for gender neutral and restrooms. The above example shows that we combined the terms toilet and restrooms with OR. Any source with toilet or restrooms will show up in the search results, and gender neutral is still present and must also show up in all of the search results. By adding OR and the word restrooms, we went from 2,769 search results to 5,944, so it's obvious we broadened the search.

 

NOT 

We use NOT when we want to exclude terms from the search results. NOT can help us when we're getting a lot of results that have nothing to do with our topic. 

Note: The following search example shows three lines of search terms. In One Search, we can always click the + Add a new line button to add lines.

In the example above, notice that the default AND remains before the second search box, but the drop-down menu was used to change AND to NOT in the third line.

NOT isn't used very often but can be helpful when we are getting results that are not relevant. In this example, all search results that have to do with "school" have been taken out of the result set. This took the search results down from 5,944 to 2,395, narrowing our results.

 

Using "quotation marks"

We use quotation marks around words to make the database search them as a phrase (this works in Google too). This means that the words will be searched in the exact order we type them.

 

In the example above, we changed gender neutral to "gender neutral." The quotation marks mean that all of our search results must include the exact phrase gender neutral. In the search before this one, some of the articles might have had the word gender at the beginning of the article and the word neutral in the middle, so although both words were present in the article, they weren't together in this exact phrase. Notice that this simple change narrowed our search results from 2,395 in the example before this one to 1,517.