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A third way of making your search more efficient is to use ‘Boolean operators’. This involves combining your key words using ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’ to make your search either more specific or more general. For example, if you want only articles that discuss both children and adolescents, enter ‘children and adolescents’. The more words you join with ‘and’, the smaller the number of results. Entering ‘children and adolescents and friendship’ will only get you articles that discuss both children and adolescents in relation to friendship.

If you want to widen your search results, use ‘or’. For example if you want all of the articles that discuss only children as well as all of the articles that discuss only adolescents, you should search for ‘children or adolescents’. ‘Or’ is also useful for entering synonyms into your search. If the topic you are interested in is commonly referred to in a number of ways, you should use ‘or’ to capture as many relevant articles as possible. Some authors, for example, may use the word teenager instead of adolescent. In this case, you should search for ‘adolescents or teenagers’. The more words you join with ‘or’ the larger the number of results.

It is common to combine ‘or’ and ‘and’ operators. For example, if you are interested in how adolescents form friendships, you might search for: ‘adolescents or teenagers and friendship’. Note: for some databases, you need to put terms you want to connect by ‘or’ in brackets, for example: ‘(adolescents or teenagers) and friendship’.

Using the operator ‘not’ narrows your search by excluding any article with the word or phrase which follows ‘not’. This is useful when one of your key words has multiple meanings. For example the word capital can mean a sum of money or it can refer to a city where government is based. If you are only interested in the first meaning, you can enter ‘capital not city’. This makes it more likely that your results will only include articles relating to finance.

Search screens vary in format, so in some cases you may need to type in the operators yourself, in others you may select them from a drop down menu. Spend some time practising using different databases or search engines.

Tips

Use Boolean operators to refine your key word searches.

Use ‘and’ to combine key words and narrow your results.

Use ‘or’ to include synonyms for key words and widen your results.

Use ‘not’ to exclude irrelevant items.

Exercise 9

Prepare to do a key word search of the essay question: Is generosity an innate human trait? by following steps 1–4 below.

1Underline the key words.

2Write a synonym for generosity.

3Decide where to use quotation marks to indicate a phrase.

4Write your search terms using the Boolean operators ‘or’ and ‘and’.