BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE EXAMPLES HOW TO
BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE EXAMPLES MANUAL

BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE EXAMPLES MANUAL

The use of the created Boolean string yields 1726 results, which is a relatively large number of articles for manual selection of the most relevant sources. 1726 results for manual processing (another search string is required).These parts represent four elements of the PICO question of interest – AND operators between them ensure the presence of all elements in search results, and OR operators are applied to consider common synonyms. The Boolean search string might look complex, but it can be easily broken down into four parts. This screenshot illustrates the literature search process undertaken for my project about the comparative benefits of oscillating-rotating over manual toothbrushes for those with gingivitis. Topic: oscillating-rotating toothbrushes and their benefits over manual toothbrushes in gingivitis patients.Boolean search can be conducted using PubMed search engine (Ortega & Barker, 2019).NOT – refines the search (allows detecting and excluding irrelevant results).

OR – broadens the search (requires only one of the options’ presence).

AND – narrows the search (requires the presence of two or more terms simultaneously).

This eliminates ambiguity for the search engine and ensures that in its results maiden must exist, either unicorn and pegasus may exist, but that the term 'tapestry' should not exist. By grouping the terms this way, you are telling the search engine which terms must be present and which terms are optional. In the above example, (unicorn OR Pegasus) is a sub-query. When your search query includes multiple Boolean operators, parenthesis are important to help the search engine group them in a way that is relevant for your research. This set of results is smaller than the previous one, and no longer includes any content that includes the word, 'tapestry.' Using NOT in queries let the search engine know that we are not interested in the subsequent terms of the search. If you are seeing too many results that are not relevant to their research, finding a common pattern or theme in those results in which you might exclude a term, might be helpful.įor example, if you were only looking for scholarship on magical creatures that mentions unicorns or Pegasus, but do not want to see any results that include tapestries, the following query would work: Using the NOT Boolean operator will narrow your search results by telling the search engine to exclude results that have a particular search term present. The OR operator also works well if you want to include multiple synonyms in the same search.

Using the OR Boolean operator will expand your search results by telling the search engine to return results that have EITHER/ANY of the search terms present.įor exampe, if you wanted to expand your results to include texts that mention unicorns and include results that mention Pegasus as well, the OR operator would expand that search:Īfter using the OR operator, you will return an expanded list of results to review. This will decrease the number of results to review and help you more easily find a relevant article.Īll 1,386 total results will include both the term “unicorn” and the term “maiden.” If, for example, you are interested in researching the claim that unicorns appear to maidens, you might refine this set of results further by adding the operator AND along with 'maiden” to your 'unicorn' search. Learn more about the AND, OR, and NOT operators, and how they work on JSTOR, below:ĪND is the default Boolean operator, and using it will narrow your search results by telling the search engine to return results that have BOTH/ALL search terms present.įor example, when you search JSTOR for scholarly content using only the search term 'unicorn,' the search yields a very large set of results. To use them, Boolean operators must be typed in all capital letters.

BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE EXAMPLES HOW TO

How to use Boolean logic to narrow your searchīoolean operators help search engines use logic to limit, narrow, or broaden your search results in order to surface content that is most relevant to your search.

Boolean search engine examples