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How to Use KYVL - tutorial

Finding Books and Articles: Boolean Operators

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) allow you to refine and define your search statement . You may need to reduce the number of hits or titles that you retrieve (AND). You may want to expand your statement by adding other terms to get more information (OR). You might find it necessary to exclude a specific term from your findings (NOT). Boolean operators permit you to manipulate your search in order to achieve some of these results.

AND tells the database to search for both of the words you type. AND is good for joining concepts together and for narrowing a search. Example: Search for education AND university in order to make sure that your results contain both words.

OR tells the database to search for either word you type in and therefore broadens and enlarges your search results. OR is good for searching synonyms. Example: Search for university OR college in order make sure that your results include all mentions the words of university or college, even if only one of the words is included in the article.

NOT tells the database to eliminate resources or articles which are not of interest to you based on a term that you have determined you do not want to see in your results. Example: Search for mexico NOT new to retrieve records that mention Mexico but not New Mexico.

Be very careful when using the NOT operator. You will exclude every result that contains this word, no matter the way in which the word is used in that article. You may exclude articles that you would want to see just because they happen to contain that word. Think about all the different ways a word could be used before using NOT in your search.


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Last updated: Thursday, 08-Aug-2002 13:54:33 EDT