Parentheses, to differentiate your logical groups.Д«oolean Operators, to associate them in the right way.ДЄ keyword can contain letters, digits or underscores.

If you have any questions or need any assistance please contact a librarian.Through our Advanced Alerts, the Boolean Query enables you to enhance the quality of your results and to monitor more precisely the topics that matter to you.ДЄdvanced Alertsgive you the option to associate your keywords the way you want to create the perfect query and reduce potential noise.ДЈ elements are necessary to build an Advanced Alert query: Paul.Д«ecoming familiar with Boolean searching will make you a more efficient researcher. Or you can search for the opposite by using crime AND Minneapolis OR St. If your topic is crime in the outstate Minnesota region, for example, you can enter crime AND Minnesota NOT Twin Cities. If, for example, you need articles about casinos but not about those on Indian reservations you can use the following query: casinos NOT Indian.Д¬OMBINING DIFFERENT OPERATORSВ вЂ“ the different operators may be combined with a single search query. NOTВ вЂ“ this operator allows you to narrow your results to a sub-topic within a broader topic. The OR operator is best used with more specific search terms. A search for education OR computersВ will return tens of thousands of articles. Be careful when using the OR operator with broader terms. This search will return every article that mentions at least one of these terms. If you want to make sure, for example, that you locate all the articles in a database that deal with the human lung you might want to use this search query: lung OR pulmonary OR respiratory. A search with the OR operator will find all the articles that include at least one of the search terms in your query. ORВ вЂ“ this is the opposite of the AND operator in that the OR operator is used to broaden a search. Cancer AND smoking AND womenВ will find articles that deal specifically with smoking-related cancers in women. For example, football AND injuriesВ will locate articles about football-related injuries but not articles about fantasy football leagues or household injuries.

The AND operator causes the database to return to you only those articles that contain both or all of your search terms. Three Boolean operatorsДЄNDВ вЂ“ this is the most commonly used operator because it helps researchers narrow their results when searching in large databases. By using a Boolean strategy to focus your search more specifically you will discover that the results of your search will be more relevant and, therefore, more helpful to you.

As you look through your results you will discover that most of these articles have nothing to do with the particular aspect of the topic you are researching. If you go to one of our periodical articles databases and enter a very broad search term such as nursingВ or psychologyВ or AIDSВ you will come up with tens of thousands of articles. Becoming familiar with Boolean operators will make you a more efficient searcher and save you time as you go about your research.ДЄ Boolean search is most frequently used when your initial search query returns far too many hits, the majority of which appear to bear no relevance to your topic. By using this strategy you can focus your search query and eliminate, in some cases, thousands of search results that are not going to be helpful to you. A handy strategy to use when searching a periodical articles database or the entire Internet using a search engine such as Yahoo or Google is what is called a Boolean search.

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