
What if you get a reasonable amount of results, but they aren't relevant to your research question?īoolean operators can allow us to broaden or narrow a search and to tailor a search to be specific to our particular research question.ģ.

BOOLEAN SEARCH STRATEGIES HOW TO
How to use parenthesis to group related terms.How to use the Boolean operators AND, OR & NOT to expand or limit a set of search results.What Boolean logic is and where it is used.They may not, however, understand how to formally structure a strategy or utilize multiple related keywords within one.īy the end of this unit students will understand: Students will be familiar with keyword searching through Google and possibly through the library catalog and databases. This lesson demonstrates how search strategies can be planned and structured to achieve better search results and how Boolean operators are used to create them. This lesson will continue the wellness theme established by the essential question "How can we maintain our well-being" by focusing searches on a well-ness related issue of the students' choice.

This type of strategy can allow students to search more efficiently by narrowing overly broad strategies, broadening those that aren't generating enough results and tailoring the strategy to generate more results that are relevant for the student's research question. This lesson is designed to introduce students to the use of Boolean operators to construct a search strategy using multiple keywords and synonyms.

They may become frustrated if they don't find what they're looking for quickly. When performing research, students may spend a great deal of time looking through search results which are not quite what they are looking for or repeating searches with new keywords.
