Boolean Logic Using Boolean Logic to more effectively search the internet and databases Karen Yurish May 2004

What is Boolean Logic? George Boole, 19 th century mathematician (Bopp and Smith 100) Form of symbolic logic which “uses common words... to create and manipulate sets” of information (Bopp and Smith 101)

Benefits of Boolean Logic Broaden Search Narrow Search

OR Will yield results that have either one search word OR the other hornets or wasps will give you results that contain either word

Truncation (*,!) Shortens a word or eliminates characters to search for many forms of a word Also called “wildcards” or “stemming” presiden* will search for president, presidents, presidential wom*n will search for woman and women

AND (+) Will search for results which ONLY contain both of your search words harmony and hornets will only find results that contain BOTH words

NOT (-) Will eliminate terms from your search rock not music will only search for physical rocks, not musical bands

Quotation Marks Quotation marks will search for the EXACT PHRASE in quotation marks In this way, you limit the search to an exact phrase “Harmony Intermediate School” will yield results with that exact phrase

Proximity Proximity is a refinement of the Boolean operator AND (Bopp and Smith 107) A special operator is used for this search such as adj (adjacent) or n (near) harmony n/3 drama would give you a result such as “Harmony Intermediate School Drama Club...” because drama is at most three words from harmony

Advanced Searches Still not finding what you need? Use the “Help” Section in any search engine or database to do an even more advanced search Works Cited Bopp, Richard E and Linda C. Smith. Reference and Information Services: An Introduction, 3 rd edition. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 2001.