Searching by Topic
Boolean Operators
Truncation & Wildcards
Descriptors
Unlike Google Scholar, however, most databases will treat a string of keywords as a specific phrase, so entering "asperger syndrome children" may not be the best way to search. To combine your keywords and phrases, you need to use what are called Boolean operators.
Boolean operators are simply the words AND, OR, and NOT. They help you broaden (find more) or narrow (find fewer, more relevant) your search results.
The Boolean operator AND helps combine keywords and phrases to find where the terms intersect. The AND operator narrows your search to retrieve only those articles containing both the phrase Asperger syndrome and the word children.
In this example, the light blue circles represent all the articles that contain the phrase Asperger syndrome as well as all the articles that contain the word children. The dark blue represents the results from your search - only those documents that contain both of the search terms you are looking for.
