CINAHL Complete

Ever heard of Boolean Searching, Boolean Operators or Boolean Logic? Don't worry if you haven't!

Boolean refers to combining keywords with the words AND, OR, or NOT. It's a way to expand or limit the number of search results you get in the database:

[keyword 1] and [keyword 2] = articles with both keywords

[keyword 1] or [keyword 2] = articles with either keyword

[keyword 1] not [keyword 2] = articles will have keyword 1, but do not have keyword 2 

Scroll down for a detailed explanation of them all, or jump to each one: AND, OR, NOT

If you want the database to find results with ALL of your search terms, connect them with AND:

This search will find articles with both the words social media and students. I limited my search to Full Text articles only, and got 558 results: 

That's a lot of articles to sort through, so how can we narrow down our search results? Add another keyword connected with AND:

The database is going to search for articles with all of our search terms: not only social media and students, but also grades now.

The more keywords you have connected with AND, the fewer results you're going to get:

social media and students = 558 results

social media and students and grades = 9 results

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 If you want the database to find results with ANY of your search terms, connect them with OR:

This search will find us articles that mention either Facebook or Twitter. When you limit your search to full text results, there are over 12,000:

Check out the difference in results when you use AND instead of OR:

Facebook OR Twitter = 12,011 results

Facebook AND Twitter = 1,884 results

You can see that connecting keywords with OR will expand the number of results. You can use this to your advantage by combining different Boolean operators in one search.

In this search, we're looking for articles with the words students and twitter. We get almost 400 results:

 In this search, we're looking for articles with the words students and facebook.  We get just over 1,000 results:

But you don't have to do two separate searches! We can combine both by mixing Boolean operators:

So in this example, we're asking the database to find articles with the word students, and also EITHER Facebook or Twitter. 

Notice how I've put parentheses around (facebook or twitter) to group the terms together. It's like the PEMDAS acronym in math to remember order of operations - things that are in parentheses are calculated first.

As you might expect, adding OR is going to expand the number of search results we get:

students and twitter = 307 results

students and facebook = 686 results

students and (facebook or twitter) = 873 results

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If you want the database to omit results with a certain word, connect it with NOT.

This works well when the same word has two different meetings. For example, if you were searching for social network, but kept getting results about the movie called "The Social Network," you could type social network not film, or social network not sorkin.

This also works if you want to exclude articles that mention a word related to your topic.

In this example, we're searching for articles with the words social media and identity:

But let's say you're not interested in all forms of social media - maybe you don't care about people who blog. You can make sure NONE of your results include the word blogs by using the Boolean operator NOT.

Notice how I've included parentheses again around the keywords we want to keep together:

We've gone from 128 results to 117 results: the database has removed the 11 results that included the word blogs from our list.

social media and identity = 128 results

(social media and identity) not blogs = 117 results 

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