Library and Internet Skills

Table of Contents

Combining Search Strategies

You can combine all of the keyword search strategies, Boolean 'and,' 'or,' and 'not,' phrase searching, truncation, and field operators, to create very sophisticated search strategies.

If you want to combine the Boolean 'and' and 'or,' you will need to use brackets. The brackets group all of the keywords that are joined by 'or' together. These tell the catalogue which instructions to process first. If you do not use the brackets, your results will be distorted.

Example:

child? and (media or television) and violen?

Examples of combined searches.

Topic:	Strategy:
the effect of television violence on children	child$ and (media or television) and violen$
the incidence of acid rain in Ontario	acid rain{su} and ontario{su}

books by Adachi or Isaacs about baseball	(adachi or isaacs){au} and baseball{su}
Books about ADD	attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and ritalin

One could also use the Advanced Search feature to accomplish the same effect:

This search will return the same results as the (adachi or isaccs){au} and baseball{su} example listed above.