When searching databases, you can cannect your keywords with AND, OR, or NOT, also known as Boolean operators.
Use AND for combining two separate concepts (all results will contain both keywords).
gender and television
depression and social media
Use OR for combining related keywords or concepts (results will contain either keyword). There's always more than one way to say something.
teenagers or adolescents
cats or felines
Use NOT to exclude specific words from your search results. Use NOT when your search is pulling up irrelevant results. For example:
virus not computer
Manchester not united
Many databases have a dropdown menu with AND, OR and NOT on the advanced search page.
In the example above, the three keywords are connected with AND, bring up 153 search results.
The second example shows how you can broaden your results by incorporating alternate keywords/synonyms with OR. In the example above, incorporating alternate keywords using OR increased the search results from 153 to 350.
