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SOC 190 Racial Violence in America

Using AND, OR, & NOT in Your Searches

Most databases will assume you are searching for all the terms you enter in the search bar unless you give it specific searching instructions using the terms AND, OR, or NOT.

AND, OR, NOT (known as Boolean Operators) are used to connect and define the relationship between your search terms. Use uppercase letters for Boolean operators within searches.
 

AND

Narrows the search by telling Library Search to search for all records with both keywords or phrases.

    • college AND "social mobility"–will only find records with both words/phrases.

Venn Diagram highlighing the intersection between "college" and "social mobility"

OR

Broadens the search to include records with either keyword/phrase, or both.

    • college OR "higher education"

Venn Diagram highlighing the entire area of both "college" and "higher education"

NOT

Narrows your search. Tells database to search the first word but exclude the second word.

    • cloning NOT sheep

Venn Diagram highlighting the area of "cloning" but not where it intersects with "sheep"

 

Using Parentheses to Group Terms

Use parentheses to group terms within a search. Grouping similar or related terms in parentheses with OR allows you to search multiple variations of a concept at the same time.

  • "social mobility"AND (college OR university OR "higher education")  will find records with phrase "social mobility" and at least one of the terms college, university, or the phrase higher education.

Phrase Searching

Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. Searching for "William Edward White" would look for that exact phrase only, instead of looking for the words William, Edward, and White separately.

All Together Now

You can combine groups of terms with parentheses, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and phrase searching to create a powerful search query. Here's an example:

("William White" OR "William Edward White" OR "W White" OR "W E White) AND (baseball OR "base ball)

This search looks for variations on the name William Edward White and variant spellings of baseball. (In the past, it was sometimes written as "base ball" or "base ball." Databases usually disregard dashes and hyphens.)