Women's Studies Program

BOOLEAN OPERATORS for Finding Relevant Articles

AND – Use AND when you want documents that contain all terms to appear in your results.

e.g.  women AND military

OR – Use OR when you want documents that contain either one of the terms to appear in your results.

e.g. youth OR adolescent OR teenager 

NOT – Use NOT when you want to exclude documents that contain terms following NOT in your results.

e.g.  women AND California NOT “Los Angeles” 

“ ” Quotes – Enclose specific phrases in double quotation marks when you want documents that contain the exact phrases in your results.

e.g.    “civil rights” AND women
         “The Old Man and the Sea” - exact title
 

(  ) Parentheses – Enclose terms in parentheses you want to group together.

e.g.  (women OR female) AND (ethnicity OR race)  
 

* Asterisk as wildcard

e.g.  femini* returns all documents containing a word beginning with crim (feminine, feminism, feminism, feminist, etc.)
        wom*n returns all documents containing woman or women