![]() It can be a safeguard against missing results because you’ve used the wrong term, or because researchers have used different terms or different spellings in different parts of the world and over time to capture the concept. Use OR to capture concepts that might be represented with two or more different words. While AND refines your search, OR broadens it. See exactly how PubMed has interpreted your search by looking at the search details on the advanced search page. It will pick up some words as phrases that it maps to MeSH headings, but words that don’t correspond to those headings will be treated as though they’ve been typed with an AND. We will go into what this means in our upcoming blog post 'Research Basics: Phrases and Proximity'. If the number of results is higher with the AND than without it, you’ll know that you need to type AND to avoid having the database treat your terms as a phrase or as adjacent terms. To check what’s happening in a database, run a search with two words with an AND, and then run it again without the AND. Exactly how close will depend on behind-the-scenes decisions made by your university library. ![]() In others, such as any on the EBSCOhost platform, the database will treat the words as though they are either right next to each other (as a phrase) or close to each other. For example, any databases on the Web of Science platform do this. In some databases, if you don’t type a Boolean operator between words, the database will treat those words as though they have an AND between them. Be aware that if you add a term with AND that is the “wrong” term, perhaps capturing an idea with a different word than researchers use, you risk missing relevant results. When you connect all the terms with AND, you’ll know that the only search results you see will contain all three terms, which is represented by the orange overlap of all three circles.ĭepending on where you are searching, your AND search can look like this:Īll three configurations above are the same search.Įach additional term or concept that you add with AND will make your search more specific and targeted. In the diagram below, one circle represents results that have the word packaging in them, one represents results with logistics in them, and the final circle represents results with fish* in them. In some databases (like PubMed) you need to capitalize your Boolean operators, and in others (like Web of Science) you don’t, but it never hurts to capitalize them. There are three main search-building Boolean Operators- AND, OR, and NOT.ĪND is used to indicate that both terms are present in the results, or all terms if you connect more than two terms with AND. Knowing how to use them correctly makes all the difference between a frustrating and a satisfactory searching experience. Researchers use them to configure their searches to find more precise and relevant results. These operators -or connecting words -tell a database how to combine search terms. Boolean operators are the bones of any good literature search.
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