The keywords you use can have a profound impact on the results of your research. Using the “right” words will speed up the research process, while the “wrong” words can bring to it to a halt.
Before you can begin searching for information, you need to identify keywords related to your topic. Key terminology can be easily be found by scanning:
Research Question: What are the effects of intervention programs in elementary schools on the rate of childhood obesity among 3rd - 6th grade students?
Keywords: effect; intervention program; elementary school; childhood obesity
Boolean Search String: (effect OR impact) AND "intervention program" AND ("elementary school" OR primary education) AND "child* obesity"
Research Question: What effects does an inclusive environment have on all the children in the classroom covering all aspects of learning?
Keywords: inclusive environment; effect; learning
Boolean Search String: (inclusive environment OR "inclusive classroom") AND (effect OR impact) AND learning
Boolean searching refers to a specific set of search "connectors" or "operators" that you can use to broaden or narrow your search. Boolean searching can be especially useful in ridding your search of irrelevant results. Conversely, it can be helpful in increasing the number of relevant results you retrieve.
AND is used to narrow a search. If you connect two or more terms with AND, all of those terms must be present in your results. Many if not most databases automatically insert AND between any terms you type into the search box.
OR is used to broaden a search. If you connect two or more terms with OR, either of those terms can be present. They might both be present, but they don't have to be present like they do with AND.
NOT is used to exclude specific terms from a search. Much like AND, it narrows a search, but unlike AND, it requires that a given term not be present.
There are additional ways you can search in a database to maximize your search.
Quotation marks should be used around a phrase or concept of two or more words. Doing this ensures that the concept will be searched for as a whole and not picked apart by the database.
To make even better use of Boolean operators, you can enclose search terms and their operators in parentheses to specify the order in which they are interpreted. Information within parentheses is read first, and then information outside parentheses is read next.
The asterisk can be used on most resume databases and non-Internet search engines as a root word/stem/truncation search. In other words, the search engine will return and highlight any word that begins with the root/stem of the word truncated by the asterisk.
The wildcard is an advanced search technique that can be used to maximize your search results in library databases. Wildcards are used in search terms to represent one or more other characters.
A question mark (?) may be used to represent a single character, anywhere in the word. It is most useful when there are variable spellings for a word, and you want to search for all variants at once.