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Research Guides

Black Health Pedagogy & Research Guide

Structuring a Search: Boolean Operators & Search Symbols

Boolean Operators: 

  • Help to specify inclusion and define how the terms within your search relate to one another.
  • The three most commonly used Boolean operators in databases are AND, OR, and NOT.

AND - narrows a search

The first venn diagram shows when you search for "hand hygiene" AND "compliance",

you will be given only results that include BOTH words.

OR - broadens a search

The second venn diagram shows that when you search for "adolescents" OR "teenagers",

you will be given all results that includes EITHER words

Search Symbols:

There are several search symbols, aka wildcards, that can be used in many databases to improve the efficiency of your search. Some commonly used ones are truncation, quotation marks, and proximity searching.

Truncation Quotation Marks Adjacency/Proximity Searching
  • Useful for finding variations of a base word
  • By strategically adding an asterisk or star (*) to the root word, you can find variant spellings or endings

  • Be careful not to truncate too early!  If you search food*, for example, you would receive all results that contain: food, foods, foodstuff, foodlessness, foodie, and so on

Example:

mother* will return results that have the words:

mother, mothers, mothering

.

Useful to group words together as an exact phrase.

Example: 

"Mental health"

"Black Canadian"
  • Finds words close to one another
  • Can be useful for finding variations of phrases

Example:

Patient adj3 handoff

finds words within 0, 1 or 2 words of one another in an OVID database (e.g. Medline, Embase, etc), in either direction

Patient N2 handoff 

finds words within 0, 1, or 2 words of one another in an Ebsco database (e.g. CINAHL), in either direction

Note: The symbols used vary from one database to another. Please consult our guide on Textwords: Codes and Tips, or the Help section in a database.

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