Music

Library search tools such as OneSearch, Academic Search Complete, and JSTOR use Boolean logic to understand your searches.

Boolean operators — words like AND, OR, and NOT — link your keywords together to tell the database exactly what you’re looking for.

• AND – Narrows your results. All keywords must appear in the source. Some databases add AND automatically, but it’s always fine to include it yourself.
   
• OR – Expands your results. Use it to include synonyms or related terms so you don’t miss sources that use different wording. Any keywords connected with OR should go inside parentheses, e.g. (cat OR kitten OR feline).
   
• NOT – Excludes unwanted terms. This helps you filter out irrelevant results.

Want to learn more about Boolean operators? Watch this short [2:44] video:

Phrase Searching

Sometimes your keywords are more than one word. Use quotation marks to keep multiple words together and find results with the exact phrase:

• "rap music"
• "cell phone"

This technique can also be helpful when searching for book titles or people’s names.

Truncation

Use a special character (usually an asterisk *) at the end of a root word to find all variations of that word. For example:

• politic* will find politics, political, politician
• Chican* will find Chicano, Chicana, Chicanx

But be careful not to make your root too short, or you might get unrelated results! For example:

• cat* will find cat and cats, but also catastrophe, category, catering, and more.

Check your database’s help section to see which truncation symbol it uses. Most Pierce databases use the asterisk *.

Parentheses

Use parentheses to group ideas together and control how the database processes your search. It will search for the terms inside the parentheses first. For example:

• ("rap music" OR "hip hop") AND censorship

This tells the database to find sources that mention either “rap music” or “hip hop”, and that also include the word censorship.