Tuesday Tips: Boolean NOT

One of my favorite search skills is eliminating things from the results list. There are so many words and phrases that overlap or are interdisciplinary, it can be hard to weed through all the results. 

Enter the Boolean operator NOT.

You can use NOT to exclude particular words or phrases from your research results. For example, if you are interested in finding resources about the effects of climate change other than sea-level rise, you can type ["climate change" NOT "sea-level"] into the search box.

In some tools you use a minus sign (-) instead of NOT, but the function is the same.

Some databases also offer filters where you can use checkboxes to exclude certain terms, subjects, or resource formats.

All of these function to help you reduce the number of results to find more targeted and relevant resources.

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