What Is a Boolean Search?
Named after 19th-century British mathematician George Boole, a Boolean search allows you to specify the logical relationships among keywords in your search. The basic elements of a Boolean search involve specifying whether keywords or phrases can appear in a search, must appear in a search, or must not appear in a search. By specifying these relationships, you are better able to locate information relevant to your topic. The most commonly used Boolean search terms are AND, OR, and NOT. Please note that, while these are the terms most often used, many search engines use their own variants of these terms on advanced search forms. It’s also important to remember that the specific commands for requiring or excluding keywords or phrases will vary depending on the electronic source you are searching. Your best bet is to review the online help on Boolean searches when you’re searching a database, library catalog, or Web search site for the first time. Boolean AND Searches: When you conduct a
A handy strategy to know when searching a periodical article database or the entire Internet using a search engine such as Yahoo or Google is what is called Boolean searching. By using this strategy you can better focus your search and eliminate, in some cases, thousands of search results that are not going to be helpful to you. Learning to join your search terms with Boolean operators will make you a more efficient searcher and save you time as you go about your research. A Boolean search is most frequently used when your initial search query returns far too many hits, many of which appear to be unrelated to your topic. If you go to one of our article databases and enter a very broad search term such as nursing or psychology or AIDS you will retrieve tens of thousands of articles. As you look through your results you will discover that the articles cover any and every imaginable subtopic within those areas. By using the Boolean strategy to focus your search more specifically, you will
