Boolean operators are words you use to link your search terms together when searching for resources.
Use them to increase or decrease the number of search results to find what you need
Boolean Operator | Example | Reason to Use |
AND | women AND military | Searches for items that talk about both concepts together, and to DECREASE RESULTS. |
OR | women OR females | Searches for items that talk about either concept individually, and to INCREASE RESULTS. |
NOT | women NOT men | To eliminate terms and concepts and to DECREASE RESULTS. |
When searching databases, put quotation marks around phrases to search for those exact words together.
For example, search: "climate change"
This tells the database to find only results with the full phrase "climate change", not separate occurrences of "climate" and "change"
Truncation is a technique used to broaden your search. Truncation searches multiple forms of a root word to include various word endings and spellings.
A wildcard is a character that can be used in a search term to represent one or more other characters. Substitute a symbol for one letter of a word.
The video shows the same steps outlined above. This is in place of a transcript, because there are no spoken words in the video.
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