Today's post in our series on tips to improve one's searching in academic databases involves a simple concept with a fancy name: Boolean operators.
Simply put, operators are characters that tell a computer what action to perform. Boolean operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT. Search engines are designed to ignore a list of very common words (called stop words) because if they did not, searches would return too many results. A search that included the word the would include every English-language document ever. Except for the three listed above, conjunctions are on that list.
These days, search engines use the AND operator by default. That fact, plus search engines ignoring stop words, make quotation marks necessary when searching for an exact phrase. So in part 2, when we searched for study English pronunciation, the system actually searched for all the documents containing all three terms, and then ranked them by those words' proximity to each other. Yeah. There's a lot about search engines we're not covering here.
OR lets you search for items that use any of several words. This is good to use when you know certain words are used interchangeably, like typing business OR organization. OR also increases the number of results that your search returns.
NOT excludes the term from your search. So if I want information about construction equipment, but keep getting information about wading birds, I would try crane NOT bird.
We apologize, but we couldn't think of a movie title to fit today's theme. [sigh]
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