38 Creating a Search Statement
Combining Your Keywords
Once you have dissected your research question, found the main concepts, and listed several keywords to describe these concepts (e.g., synonyms, narrower terms, broader terms), it is time to combine those keywords in meaningful ways in order to perform a search for information resources. The combination of terms using various search strategies, called a search statement, will help you get more precise results than typing in a whole research question or just a few words into a search bar. Search statements are almost like a set of instructions given to whatever search option you are using (e.g., library catalog, library database) that describe what you want to find.
Boolean Operators
Named after the mathematician, George Boole, Boolean operators are used as conjunctions that combine or exclude certain keywords in your search. Though Boolean operators are used in logic, mathematics, and computer science, there are three common Boolean operators used by search engines (e.g., library catalogs, academic databases, and some online search engines). Think of Boolean operators as instructions that tell a search engine what to do with your keywords. Some search tools need Boolean operators to be typed in all capital letters in order for them to work, so it is a good idea to always type them in all caps whenever you are using them.
AND
The Boolean operator AND is used between all the keywords and phrases that you want to include in your search. When creating a search statement to find information on the effects of divorce on high school students’ GPA, the Boolean AND operator would go between our three keywords/phrases:
Divorce AND grade point average AND high school
By doing this, the information sources that will be returned in the results will all contain all three of these keywords/phrases somewhere within them.
OR
The Boolean operator OR is used to search for alternative keywords. Remember, there are many words that one could use to describe the same concept and OR gives you the option to search for multiple, synonymous terms at once. Instead of searching for various alternative keywords in different searches, OR allows you to search for multiple alternative keywords in the same search.
grade point average OR academic achievement
NOT
The Boolean NOT excludes certain keywords from your search. This Boolean operator is not a commonly used one, but can be very helpful if you are getting many irrelevant results. Boolean NOT is best used when using keywords that have associations with multiple things. For instance, if you were trying to search for information on the animal Jaguar and kept getting too many results about the car brand Jaguar, you could use the NOT operator to exclude the word “car” from your search. Jaguar NOT car would exclude any information sources that contained the word car. Be aware that using NOT can exclude relevant results, as well. If an article or website that had some great in