Lesson 3:
Developing a Strategy

Objectives

Define a Topic

Brainstorm Search Terms

Build a Keyword Search

Resources

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Table of Contents

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Build a Keyword Search

Boolean Searching Using AND

In Brainstorm Search Terms, you developed a list of concepts related to your research topic. The next step is to enter those concepts into a database. However, entering your concepts in one long string--"college students jobs grades"--usually doesn't work. Unlike web search engines, databases expect you to combine concepts using special terms.

AND is a special term that tells databases to combine concepts and lets you narrow your search.

Inserting AND between your concepts allows you to search for more than one concept at a time. For example, imagine you are researching women in college athletics.

concept 1		women
concept 2		college
concept 3		athletes

Note that the different concepts are combined with the connecter AND. Using AND will instruct the database to retrieve everything with concept 1 that also includes concept 2 and concept 3.