Refresher on Keyword Searching + Boolean Operators

Boolean Operators - Fancy way to refer to OR, and AND, which can be used to increase precision in your search.

    OR expands the search by telling the computer to retrieve records with any of the search terms used.
    AND narrows the search by telling the computer to retrieve records with all of the search terms used.
    NOT is also sometimes used to exclude or eliminate a particular term

Truncation - Using a special symbol (usually *) that allows you to search for multiple variations of a word (ex. psycholog* will return psychologist, psychology, psychological, etc.)

An example of generating good keywords and alternatives

Topic: how women are portrayed in the media

women	or	girls	or	female
portray*	or	depict*	or	image*
film	or	television	or	movies

Example:

( women OR female) AND ( portray* OR depict*) AND (film OR movies)

Note: If you are typing the whole search into one line, use parentheses as shown above. If your search system (database or library catalog) has multiple lines, you can use them as shown below: