WMST 3525: Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Senior Seminar

Boolean operators form the basis of mathematical sets and database logic.

• They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
• The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.
• In CLIO and some other databases you DO have to use capital letters
• This type of search is possible in most library catalogs and databases, but Google and other Web search engines do not carry out OR and NOT searches properly.

Why use Boolean operators?

• To focus a search, particularly when your topic contains multiple search terms.
• To connect various pieces of information to find exactly what you're looking for.

AND

• The operator AND narrows the search by instructing the search engine to search for all the records containing the first keyword, then for all the records containing the second keyword, and show only those records that contain both.
• In many, but not all, databases, the AND is implied. 
  • Though all your search terms are included in the results, they may not be connected together in the way you want.
  • College students test anxiety  is translated to:  college AND students AND test AND anxiety. The words may appear individually throughout the resulting records.
• You can search using phrases to make your results more specific.
• For example:  "college students" AND "test anxiety". This way, the phrases show up in the results as you expect them to be.

OR

The operator OR broadens the search to include records containing either keyword, or both.
The OR search is particularly useful when there are several common synonyms for a concept, or variant spellings of a word.

medieval OR "middle ages"
 

NOT

Combining search terms with the NOT operator narrows the search by excluding unwanted terms.

Parenthesis 

• You can enclose search terms and their operators in parentheses to specify the order in which they are interpreted. Information within parentheses is read first, then information outside parentheses is read next. For example,
• When you enter (mouse OR rat) AND trap, the search engine retrieves results containing the word mouse or the word rat together with the word trap in the fields searched by default.

Here are some examples using combinations of the three operators & parenthesis

• puritans AND women AND (massachusetts OR connecticut OR "rhode island" OR "new hampshire")
• (adolescen* OR teen*) AND (cigarettes OR smok*)
• reagan AND "star wars" NOT (movie OR film OR cinema OR "motion picture")
• "zora neale hurston" AND (correspondence OR letter* OR diar* OR autobiograph* OR memoir*)

• Use "quotes" for a phrase
  • “emily bronte” will find results with the phrase “emily bronte” but not those that have “emily smith” or “charlotte bronte”
• To find variant endings of a word, use * for truncation.
  • child* finds childhood, children and child’s, as well as child
• However, don’t shorten the root word too much, or you will also find irrelevant results.
  • poli* finds politics and political, but it also finds police and polite.

Refining a Search

• You can refine your results using facets, or categories, on the left of the search results.
  • Format – to find items by physical format, e.g. book, microfilm, online
  • Publication Date
  • Author
  • Acquisition Date
  • Location
  • Language
  • Subject – to find items about a topic
  • Subject (Region) – to find items about a place
  • Subject (Era) – to find items about a time period
  • Subject (Genre) – to find items by content type, e.g. correspondence, personal narratives, fiction
  • Call Number

When searching CLIO: Use Facets on the left side of the screen to narrow things down: Publication date range, library location (Barnard, for example), topic, and more

Subject headings describe the content of each item in a database. Use these headings to find relevant items on the same topic.  Searching by subject headings (a.k.a. descriptors) is the most precise way to search article databases.

It is not easy to guess which subject headings are used in a given database. For example, the phone book's Yellow Pages use subject headings. If you look for "Movie Theatres" you will find nothing, as they are listed under the subject heading "Theatres - Movies."

Keyword searching is how you typically search web search engines.  Think of important words or phrases and type them in to get results.

Here are some key points about each type of search: