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Library Search Help Guide: Search Tips

OVERVIEW

Boolean Operators
AND
A venn diagram showing two overlapping circles. The overlapping section is highlighted.		 OR
A venn diagram showing two overlapping circles. Both circles are highlighted.		 NOT
A venn diagram showing two overlapping circles. The first circle is highlighted, except for where the second circle overlaps.
Exact Phrase "renewable energy"
Truncation employ*
Wildcard organi?ation

COMPARING EXAMPLES

The following search is an example of a poorly written search string. It does not use any boolean operators and returns only 88 results. Of these results only 18 are peer-reviewed and published recently.

The library search box with the unformatted search string - renewable energy solar organisation employment


Using skills learnt on this page the adjusted search retrieves over 1,800 results, of these results roughly 500 are peer-reviewed and published recently. 

the Library Search box with the formatted search string - ("renewable energy" OR solar) AND organi?ation AND employ*

EXACT PHRASES

Placing quotation marks around a phrase tells the Library Search to retrieve titles where those words appear together in that order as an exact phrase.

For example: "renewable energy" will retrieve titles where those words appear together in that order as a phrase but would not return a title that contains those words separately.

Note: truncation and wildcard symbols will generally not work inside exact phrases.

TRUNCATION

Use the truncation symbol (*) to find variations of a word.

employ*
a single point transforming down into multiple arrows. Indicating that the word above transforms into multiple words below.
employment, employable, employer, employing

WILDCARD

Use the wildcard symbol (?) if you want to find different spellings.

e.g. organi?ation will find

  • organisation, and
  • organization.

Note: (?) will not work at the end of a word or in a phrase search. (?) also doesn't work in a hyphenated word i.e. self-organi?ation

BOOLEAN OPERATORS

AND

Returns results in which both terms are present in resource.

By combing results with AND we direct the database to return only results that contain both terms.

"renewable energy" AND employ*

By using AND to ensure that the resources returned contained both the term "renewable energy" and the term employ*, we can be confident that the results match our needs, in this case we are looking for articles discussing employment in the renewable energy sector.

OR

Returns results in which either of the terms are present in resource.

By combing results with OR we direct the database to return results that contain either terms.

"renewable energy" OR solar

By using OR to ensure that the resources returned include either the term "renewable energy" and the term solar, we can be confident that the results match our needs, in this case we are looking for articles discussing types of renewable energy.

NOT

Returns results in which the first term is present, but the second term is not present.

By using NOT we can eliminate results from our search. This is useful when a search term has multiple meanings, or your search results are dominated by an unrelated subject. However, this should be used with caution as it may eliminate useful results from your search.