Teenagers OR adolescents: any results that contain either teenagers or adolescents will appear in your results list. Using Boolean command OR in your search tells the search engine to give you results that contain any of the words you have entered. Media AND violence: only those results that contain both media and violence will appear in your search results list. Using the Boolean command AND in your search tells the search engine to give you results that contain all of the words you have entered. Other commands include parentheses, truncation, and phrases. The most popular Boolean commands are AND, OR, and NOT. This eliminates ambiguity for the search engine and ensures that in its results maiden must exist, either unicorn and pegasus may exist, but that the term "tapestry" should not exist.Boolean is a set of commands that can be used in almost every search engine, database, or online catalogue.
By grouping the terms this way, you are telling the search engine which terms must be present and which terms are optional.
In the above example, (unicorn OR Pegasus) is a sub-query. When your search query includes multiple Boolean operators, parenthesis are important to help the search engine group them in a way that is relevant for your research. This set of results is smaller than the previous one, and no longer includes any content that includes the word, "tapestry." Using NOT in queries let the search engine know that we are not interested in the subsequent terms of the search. If you are seeing too many results that are not relevant to their research, finding a common pattern or theme in those results in which you might exclude a term, might be helpful.įor example, if you were only looking for scholarship on magical creatures that mentions unicorns or Pegasus, but do not want to see any results that include tapestries, the following query would work: Using the NOT Boolean operator will narrow your search results by telling the search engine to exclude results that have a particular search term present. The OR operator also works well if you want to include multiple synonyms in the same search. Using the OR Boolean operator will expand your search results by telling the search engine to return results that have EITHER/ANY of the search terms present.įor exampe, if you wanted to expand your results to include texts that mention unicorns and include results that mention Pegasus as well, the OR operator would expand that search:Īfter using the OR operator, you will return an expanded list of results to review. This will decrease the number of results to review and help you more easily find a relevant article.Īll 1,386 total results will include both the term “unicorn” and the term “maiden.” If, for example, you are interested in researching the claim that unicorns appear to maidens, you might refine this set of results further by adding the operator AND along with "maiden” to your "unicorn" search. Learn more about the AND, OR, and NOT operators, and how they work on JSTOR, below:ĪND is the default Boolean operator, and using it will narrow your search results by telling the search engine to return results that have BOTH/ALL search terms present.įor example, when you search JSTOR for scholarly content using only the search term "unicorn," the search yields a very large set of results. To use them, Boolean operators must be typed in all capital letters.
Advanced boolean search how to#
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