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Asnuntuck Campus Library

Asnuntuck - General Research Guide

This is a basic guide to the research cycle that should apply to most, if not all, subjects. Through this guide you can follow the steps of the research cycle and learn how to use library resources to conduct your research.

EBSCO Databases

ProQuest Databases

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

Boolean operators form the basis of database logic.

  • They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
  • The three basic Boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.

 

Why use Boolean operators?

  • To focus a search, particularly when your topic contains multiple search terms.
  • To connect various pieces of information to find exactly what you're looking for.
    • Example:
      second creation (title) AND wilmut and campbell (author) AND 2000 (year)

 

three sets of Venn diagrams 1) "enterprise" or "business" 2) "economy" and "finance" 3) "enterprise" not "Star Trek"

Image by M Cheung on Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

This information was adapted from MIT's Database Search Tips Guide.

Use AND in a search to:

  • narrow your results
  • tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records
  • example: cloning AND humans AND ethics

The purple triangle in the middle of the Venn diagram below represents the result set for this search. It is a small set using AND, the combination of all three search words.

Venn diagram showing intersections of the words "cloning", "ethics", and "humans"

Keep in mind:

  • many database will automatically put AND between your search terms
  • though all your search terms are included in the results, they may not be  connected together in the way you want
  • search using phrases may help make your results more specific
    • For example: the following two search strings will get you different results 
      • college AND students AND test AND anxiety 
      • "college students" AND "test anxiety"

 

This information was adapted from MIT's Database Search Tips Guide.

Use OR in a search to:

  • connect two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
  • broaden your results, telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records
  • example: cloning OR genetics OR reproduction

All three circles represent the result set for this search. It is a big set because any of those words are valid using the OR operator.

Venn diagram showing intersection of the words "cloning", "genetics", and "reproduction"

 

This information was adapted from MIT's Database Search Tips Guide.

Use NOT in a search to:

  • exclude words from your search
  • narrow your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms
  • example:  cloning NOT sheep

 

This information was adapted from MIT's Database Search Tips Guide.

Watch this video by the Oregon School Library System for an easy to follow explanation of Boolean operators and how to use them to build search strings when you are researching in the databases.

Other Search Strategies

Phrase searching is a search strategy that limits your results by allowing you to define how you want your search words to appear. Phrase searching is done by putting double quotation marks (" ") around the words you want to search as a phrase in the database.

 

For example

Searching for the keywords academic success will yield different results than searching for the phrase "academic success". The first search will return results that have the two words (academic and success) anywhere in the article.

Screenshot showing result of searching academic AND success in EBSCO

 

The second search will return results that have the two words appearing one after the other in this specific order ("academic success").

Screenshot showing the result of phrase searching "academic success" in EBSCO

So you've found one article that is perfect for you, and you want to find more that are as similar as possible. Try these tricks for using one specific article as a starting point to locate more sources.

 

Tip 1

1.  Check the tagged Subject Terms. These links will bring you to a results page of everything tagged with that subject, so if your topic is very narrow these results will likely need to be refined a bit further.

Screenshot of subject terms list from a database. List includes the words "bears", "DNA", "salmon", "demography", and "grizzly bear"

 

Tip 2

2. Consult the article's references or bibliography at the end of the full-text document. The author of an academic paper will have many citations of the relevant work of other experts and some of these other sources may also speak to your interest in the topic.

Screenshot of a references list from the end of an academic article

 

Tip 3

3. When looking at an article page in Academic Search Premier (for example), check for a button on the left side of the screen called Find Similar Results. This button will perform another search in the database, this time with keywords directly from the article you found useful already.

Screenshot showing the "Find similar results" button in Academic Search Premier

 

 

 

BONUS: Google Scholar "Cited By" Tool

While Google itself is not typically an academic-level information resource, Google Scholar is a separate open access database created to facilitate scholarship and has a very useful feature for finding related articles. Clicking the Cited By link in an article's description will bring you to a list of publications that have cited that article in their own research. Using this feature of Google Scholar will allow you to have a number of immediately relevant documents at your fingertips!

Screenshot of result in Google Scholar with an arrow pointing to the "Cited by" link

 

This information was adapted from CT State Housatonic's Housatonic ENG 0960 - Introduction to College Writing Guide.