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- Boolean Cheat Sheet
| 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 |
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