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Use parentheses to clarify relationships between search terms. The way you group your expressions within the search will determine the results you get back.

Example: A search for wom#n will retrieve woman and womenĬombine parentheses with Boolean operators to control a search.The most commonly used symbols for internal truncation are #, ? and ! Check with the resource you are using to see which symbols it uses. Example: A search for educat* will retrieve educate, educating, education, educational, educator, educators, etc.Ī symbol within a word provides for all possible variants inside a word or word stem.The most commonly used symbol is the asterisk (*). Using special symbols within a word allows you to improve the quality and number of hits you receive with a search.Ī symbol at the end of a word stem provides for all variants on the word stem. Example: A search for "chronic fatigue syndrome" will retrieve articles about the illness chronic fatigue syndrome but not some other chronic or fatigue or syndrome.Example: A search for " Ernest Hemingway" will retrieve articles about Ernest Hemingway but not some other Ernest or some other Hemingway.To do a phrase search, type the exact phrase you're looking for surrounded by quotation marks. When you do a phrase search, you'll be able to locate pages in which those words appear together in that order. Items containing "Mexico" but not "New Mexico."Ĭaution! It's easy to exclude relevant items. OR broadens a search, resulting in more hits. Items containing either "Zimbabwe" or "Rhodesia" or both. Items containing both "North Carolina" and "prohibition."ĪND narrows a search, resulting in fewer hits. The green section in each diagram represents the results for each search. The diagrams show graphically how using the AND operator narrows a search, using the OR operator broadens a search, and using the NOT operator excludes material from a search. The results of performing Boolean searches are sometimes illustrated by Venn diagrams. To learn how, watch the two video tutorials, and then read the information below.īuilding Search Strings, Part 1 Building Search Strings, Part 2 For efficient searching, use the keywords you just identified to build a search string using one or more of the following techniques.