Database Searching

Boolean operators serve as the underpinning of navigating and retrieving the desired results from a database or search engine. Understanding how these operators function and their relationship to your search terms will serve you well in your research. 

The three Boolean operators are known as the following: AND, OR, and NOT. You can connect your keywords and subject terms to these operators to craft very precise, complex search queries when your topic contains multiple themes or search terms. This will aid you in locating resources that support your research.

When you're searching in a library database, you will notice the default in any advanced search will almost always default to the AND operator. 

The purpose of the AND operator in a database or search engine is to do the following:

• narrow the results
• instruct the database that the connected terms must be present in the resulting records

An example of this kind of search would be: gender AND inequality AND wage.

Some points to consider about the AND operator:

• In some databases, the AND operator is implied. When conducting a search in Google it will automatically insert AND in between your search terms.
• While your search terms will be present in the results, they may not be connected to the topic you're researching. A search such as gender inequality wage gap would be translated as the following: gender AND inequality AND wage AND gap. The words themselves may appear individually across various records in the results page, which could lead to mixed findings for your research.
• To make this more precise you could try phrases instead. For example: "gender inequality" AND "wage gap" would yield more results targeting that specific topic.

The Boolean operator OR is used to:

• connect two or more ideas that are similar (synonyms)
• expand the scope of your results; essentially, you're instructing the database to retrieve results that mention one or all of the connected search terms
• For example: gender OR gender identity 

You would use Boolean operator NOT to:

• exclude specific words or phrases from your search
• narrow the scope of your search; you're telling the database to focus on the first term in your search string and ignore the second term.
• For example: relationships NOT romance