Welcome back! As the semester gets into gear, papers, projects, and assignments will begin to accumulate again. And to do them well, you’ll need to do research. You’ll be asked to find scholarly sources. Peer-reviewed sources. Primary sources. The kinds of things that Google and Bing just aren’t good at. But Google and Bing are easy to use. Scholarly tools take a bit more work. How do you get started?

Scholarly databases use a very precise type of language that tells the computer how to search. Much of this computer language is based on something called Boolean logic. Boolean data is that which you can label ‘true’ or ‘false’ without any ambiguity. When you search, a database or search engine will give you results that are ‘true’ for whatever you typed in, and exclude anything ‘false’ – that is, that doesn’t meet your criteria. But sometimes what you are searching for is complex. And that’s where Boolean logic terms come in – to give your searches flexibility. These terms are OR, AND, and NOT.

Say I’m looking for information about gestational diabetes mellitus. Easy enough, right? Except that it might not be called gestational diabetes mellitus in the article. It might be abbreviated GDM, or not have the word ‘mellitus’ at all. You need to structure your search in a way that you’ll get all the results for each of these three ways of saying it. Try a search like this: gestational diabetes OR gdm This will find all three forms of the word without excluding any. Basically, ‘gestational diabetes mellitus’, ‘gestational diabetes’, and ‘GDM’ will all be ‘true’ answers to your search. AND and NOT work in much the same way. Use AND if you need to find two words or concepts and NOT if you need to find one, but not if it involves the other. So you could use nutrition AND quantitative if you’re interested in finding quantitative studies on nutrition and presiden* NOT obama if you want to find information about the presidency, but not about the current president. The asterisk is a wild card that lets you search variants of words. Searching ‘presiden*’ will find ‘president’, ‘presidents’ and ‘presidency’. We could get very similar results by typing (president OR presidents OR presidency) NOT obama

But let’s say you’re interested in more complex questions. What if you want to know about gender roles in the novel Don Juan? A search like “don juan” AND (women OR gender) may work for you. This search uses ‘nesting’ – that is, separating each important concept within a set of parentheses. This particular search has two important concepts – the novel and gender. The title doesn’t really have any obvious synonyms, but the concept of gender does. The synonyms are connected with OR within the parentheses. The important concepts are connected with AND. In this case, all articles you find will have the words ‘Don Juan’, and one or the other of the words ‘women’ or ‘gender’.

You can make this as complicated as you need to. Let’s say you’re researching race-based disparities in how jail sentences are assigned. A search like this: (race OR racial) AND disparit* AND (criminal justice OR incarceration OR sentenc*) will find all three of those concepts. You’ll get an article back if it includes the words ‘racial’, ‘disparities’, and ‘incarceration’. But if the author happened to use the words ‘race’, ‘sentencing’, and ‘disparity’, you’ll still find it.

Even though it doesn’t seem like it, Google and Bing are programmed according to the same logic. Google simply assumes the word AND between every word you type. The word OR works the same way it does in the databases. And the minus sign (-) before a word is used in place of NOT. Google just makes it less obvious how the logic is being used, and thus gives you less control of the results. That’s great for ease-of-use, but bad for power and accuracy. But databases are ideal for power and accuracy – which, coincidentally, is just what is needed for your academic projects.

We have a video tutorial that covers these concepts in more depth here:

Don’t worry – even if it looks complicated, you’ll get proficient at it quickly. And together, we’ll find all the best resources for your papers and projects!

Any questions, or need help? Ask us at iueref@iue.edu!