Broadening and Narrowing Your Search
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 discoverE to search for all records with both keywords or phrases.
-
- college AND "social mobility"–will only find records with both words/phrases.

OR
Broadens the search to include records with either keyword/phrase, or both.
-
- college OR "higher education"

NOT
Narrows your search. Tells database to search the first word but exclude the second word.

Wildcard characters
Use a question mark to perform a single character wildcard search.
- wom?n -- will find records containing the words “woman”, “women” and “womyn”.
Use an asterisk to perform a multiple character wildcard search.
- cultur* -- will find records containing “culture”, “cultural”, “culturally”, etc.
Group terms within a search
Use parentheses to group terms within a search.
- shakespeare AND (tragedy OR sonnet) -- will find records with the words “Shakespeare” and either “tragedy” or “sonnet”.