School of Nursing: Search Basics

What It Does:

The AND operator narrows your search results by requiring all specified terms to be present in the results. It’s particularly useful for combining multiple concepts and finding articles that focus on their intersection.

When to Use It:

Use AND when you want results that discuss all the concepts together, rather than separately.

Example:

• If you’re researching the relationship between diabetes, exercise, and nutrition, your search would be:
  diabetes AND exercise AND nutrition

What Happens in the Search:

The database looks for results where all three terms appear together. For example:

• Articles about how exercise and nutrition can help manage diabetes.

• Studies on the combined impact of exercise and nutrition in diabetes patients.

• Articles that only mention one or two of these terms (e.g., just diabetes and exercise) will not appear in the results.

Why It’s Useful:

Using AND can find results that are highly focused results relevant to the specific combination of topics you’re interested in. It helps eliminate unrelated results and saves you time in identifying useful articles.

What It Does:
The OR operator broadens your search results by including any of the specified terms. This is ideal for synonyms or related concepts, ensuring you don’t miss relevant results.

When to Use It:
Use OR when there are multiple ways to describe a topic or concept.

Example:
If you're looking for articles about diabetes, your search would be:
diabetes OR type 1 diabetes OR diabetes mellitus

What Happens in the Search:

• Articles that mention only "Diabetes."

• Articles that mention only "Type 1 Diabetes."

• Articles that mention only "Diabetes Mellitus."

• Articles that mention any or all terms.

• The database retrieves:

Why it's useful:

This strategy casts a wider net, capturing more results that are relevant to your topic.

OR gives you MORE

What it does:

Phrase searching uses quotation marks to keep words together in the exact order you typed them, so the database looks for the exact phrase rather than the individual words scattered throughout the text.

When to use it:

Use phrase searching when you're looking for a specific term or concept made up of multiple words.

Example:

"Type 1 diabetes"

What happens in the search:

The database retrieves results where type 1 diabetes appears exactly as a phrase, rather than finding articles that mention diabetes in one part and type 1 in another. This narrows the results to be more relevant and precise.

Why it's useful:

Phrase searching uses quotation marks to find exact word combinations, helping you retrieve more focused and accurate results.

What it does:

Nesting (using parentheses) to group related terms together in a search string. This tells the database how to process the Boolean logic, ensuring that related concepts are kept together and prioritized correctly.

When to use it:

Use nesting when combining multiple synonyms or related terms with OR, and you also want to combine those terms with another concept using AND. It helps clarify the logic and avoid unintended results.

Example:

• exercise AND (diabetes OR "diabetes mellitus" OR "type 1 diabetes")

What happens in the search:

The database first processes the terms inside the parentheses, retrieving results that mention any of the diabetes-related terms. Then, it limits those results to articles that also mention exercise. Without nesting, the database might incorrectly combine terms and return irrelevant results, like articles that mention only "exercise" or only "type 1 diabetes" without the intended connection.

Why it's useful:

Nesting uses parentheses to group related terms in a search, helping databases interpret the logic correctly. It ensures that synonyms are processed together before combining with other concepts, which improves the accuracy of your results.