Once you've determined your search terms you are ready to combine them into search strings. The best way to do this is to use Boolean Operators. Boolean Operators are represented by AND, OR, and NOT. Each operator when used to combine search terms will affect your search in a different way.

• Using AND to Narrow Your Results

  Combining search terms with AND allows you to decrease the number of search results you would get from doing a search on one term or another alone. Using our topic on women and war, a search for women would be too broad and return too many search results, as would a search for war. There would likely be results in both searches that would help with our topic, but it would take too long to go through them to find those results.

  By using the operator AND, you can retrieve a more manageable set of results. If you use "women" as your first search term and "war" as your second term, you will retrieve all of the results that have those two subjects in common.

• Using OR to Broaden Your Results

  Sometimes you may find that your search terms are too narrow, giving you too few results when searching. If this happens you can add an additional search term using OR to increase the number of results. When using OR you want to combine two terms that can take the place of each other, or synonyms. You do not want to OR two terms that have nothing to do with each other.

  Working with our topic of women and war, we can use one of the synonyms for women that we identified and do a search for women or female. This will give us results that include women or female. There will be overlap but we will also get items that we would not get by searching for "women" alone or "female" alone.

• Using NOT to Narrow Your Results

  Sometimes you will perform a search using a search term that has more than one meaning or is included in another term not related to what you are researching. Using a "NOT" search is useful in these circumstances.

  If you are doing a search for "women and war" but a particular war you are not interested in keeps appearing you can add a NOT to your search to eliminate results containing that war. For example, we could search for women but not the French Revolution.

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