Chapter 8: Gathering Research and Establishing Evidence
Chapter 8: Gathering Research and Establishing Evidence
Putting Together All of Your Search Concepts Using Boolean Operators AND, OR, NOT
Remember our original research question?
Are comics a good way to teach William Shakespeare’s plays to high school students?
We can express this question using the following three key concepts that are shown on separate lines
Concept 1: comics OR graphic novels OR manga
AND
Concept 2: shakespeare
AND
Concept 3: teaching NOT (post-secondary OR university OR college)
Using the Advanced Search features of a database reminds you that the Boolean Operators are key to good searching.
Here is a screenshot showing what this search might look like using the advanced search options of a database.
In this example of an advanced search, you, the researcher, are given options on how the search is conducted. There are three main columns and multiple rows.
The columns on the left are by default labelled All Fields and have a drop down box that allows you to specify if you want to restrict your search to specific fields such as Author fields or Title fields or Subject fields. Think of fields as subsets of data that are indexed in the computer to allow more precision in searching. For our purposes, we will use the default All Fields.
The middle column is where you input your search terms, keeping each key concept on a separate line or row. Our first concept comics OR graphic novels OR manga is typed into the middle search box with the Boolean operator OR typed in capital letters so that the computer knows we want to use the operator to expand our search for this one concept to include the related terms that we identified.
The third column of the Advanced Search screen shows by default the AND operator with a drop down box allowing you to change it to one of the other operators, OR, or NOT.
In this example, we want to search for the first concept AND also the concept of Shakespeare. Continuing down to the second row, we will use the default All Fields setting in the first column, then type our concept search term shakespeare in the middle column. Although Shakespeare is a proper name and is capitalized in the English language, databases normally ignore initial capitals in a name so you do not have to capitalize Shakespeare. In the third column, we again want to use the AND operator because we want to add a third key concept that deals with teaching on the next row.
The third row uses a slightly more complex expression of the concept than we looked at when examining the use the NOT operator. We want to find articles and books that discuss the teaching of the earlier concepts, but exclude works that discuss teaching at the post-secondary level. We can express this limitation using the words in the example: teaching NOT (post-secondary OR university OR college). We can include some related terms that also indicate the concept post-secondary. In the example, the words university and college are deemed very similar or related to post