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Topic analysis

Boolean cheat sheet - text

  Boolean Example What it does
NARROW AND policy AND homelessness AND australia only locates resources containing all three keywords

NOT

-

vikings NOT "tv show" NOT "tv series"

education -preschool

 eliminated information you do not want (e.g. locates resources about Vikings, not the TV series)
" " "world health organisation" AND "immunisation rates" only locates resources with the exact phrase in "quotation marks"
TO "birth rates" 1970 TO 1980 locates resources within a specific date, measurement, or range (very useful for historical and statistical data)
site: "food scarcity" AND estonia site:edu locates resources only from URLs ending in .edu
EXPAND OR sustainability OR conservation locates resources containing at least one of the keywords
~ diwali ~desserts locates resources with synonyms for the search term, e.g. pudding, cake, sweets
? wom?n AND organi?ation AND defen?e wildcards (? ! $) substitute a symbol for one letter of a word, locates resources with different spellings (e.g. American vs Australian)
FOCUS * genetic* AND child* truncation locates resources containing all words beginning with the root word (e.g. genetics, geneticist, genetically AND childhood, children, child)
( ) ("population growth" AND taiwan) AND health OR medicine nesting locates the most relevant information first by putting greater emphasis on the terms in brackets (just like Order of Operations in mathematics)
^ "game addiction" AND adolescent* AND ("mental health"^5) weighting puts particular emphasis on one term over another in your search, prioritising the weighted term over the other search terms in the string

 

Boolean Cheat Sheet - download

Click the image below to download our one-page Boolean Cheat sheet.

 

 

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