Public Policy: Strategy

As you're progressing through the research process, following a predetermined process will help you stay on track.

• Allow a database search to be narrowed, broadened or made more precise.
• There are three Boolean operators:  AND, OR, and NOT.
• AND, OR, NOT are inserted between each search term.

AND

• Used for narrowing or focusing a search topic. 
• Specifies that both search terms must be present in the results. 

Example: Teenagers AND Violence

OR

• Used for expanding or broadening a search topic. 
• Specifies that either search term can be present in the results. 
• Often used to include synonyms or related terms.

Example: Teenager OR Juvenile OR Adolescent

NOT

• Used to eliminate false hits, or get rid of that one term that you don't want in your results list. 
• Specifies that the first term but not the second can be present in the results. 

Example: Teenagers NOT Violence. 

SSB created by University of Arizona Libraries and located at GitHub

Parentheses

• An alternative to a database's Advanced Search
• Allows you to construct complex searches combining AND, OR, NOT by grouping search terms appropriately

Example:

 (Teenagers OR Juveniles) AND Violence

Truncation

• Expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root 
• Symbol to truncate is usually an asterisk (*)
  • Example: teen* will return teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.
• Useful to include any variants authors might use to describe their research
• Not all words can effectively be truncated
  • Example: Trying to truncate woman as wom* will return wombat, womb, as well as woman and women. 

Wildcard

• Used in the middle of a word to match usually known variants of a term.
• A wildcard usually represents a single character
• Symbol to represent the single character is usually a question mark (?) but this can vary by database. 
  • Example: wom?n will return woman, women, and womyn.

Note: These search tools involve using various symbols.  The symbols change depending on the database's vendor/interface you're dealing with, and the symbols may change over time within one of these vendors/interfaces.  If you have any questions about what symbols are used in a database, check its "Help" section.

Proximity Searching:

• Proximity Searching is an advanced search technique that can help make your search more specific and efficient in library databases. 

• Proximity searching is used to narrow searches by finding words that are next to, near, or within a specified distance from each other. This is useful when you are looking for concepts that might be expressed by multiple different phrases.

For example, if you did a regular phrase search for “curriculum theories,” you would not retrieve documents mentioning theories of curriculum, theories involving curriculum, theories about curriculum, or other similar phrases. But, if you were to do a proximity search, and look for the term curriculum appearing within a number of certain words (or less) of the term theories, you would be able to retrieve many phrases formed with those words.

Proximity Operators:

• Proximity searches use operators to designate how closely, and in what order, you want the search terms to appear. Typically the proximity operators are composed of a letter (N or W) or word (NEAR) and a number (to specify the number of words appearing between your search terms). 

• Proximity operators are often used when Boolean operator searches are not narrowing down a search enough.

For example, when a search for Chicago AND blues results in too many articles that weren’t really about blues music in Chicago; they just mentioned both words somewhere in full text. Using proximity operators will narrow down the search further and increase the likelihood that blues and Chicago are linked.

Important Note:

• Different databases use different proximity operators.

• Not all of our library databases support proximity searching, or, if they do, they may require you to format your search differently. 

• Check the help menu of the database you're searching to find out what proximity operator it uses.