Boolean Operators & Modifiers – Cheat Sheet

Find exactly what you are looking for using these time-saving search boosters.

Boolean Example What it does

AND policy AND homelessness Only locates resources containing all
AND australia three keywords
NOT vikings NOT “tv show” Eliminates information you do not
NOT “tv series” want (Eg. locates resources about
NARROWS

- education –preschool vikings, not the tv series)

“world health Only locates resources with the exact
“” organisation” AND phrase in “quotation marks”
“immunisation rates”
TO “birth rates” 1970 TO Locates resources within a specific
1980 date, measurement, or range (very
useful for historical and statistical data)
site: “food scarcity” AND Locates resources only from URLs
estonia site:edu ending in .edu

OR sustainability OR Locates resources containing at least

conservation one of the keywords
EXPANDS

diwali ~desserts Locates resources with synonyms for

~ the search term, E.g. pudding, cake,
sweets
wom?n AND organi?ation Wildcards (? ! $) substitute a symbol
? AND defen?e for one letter of a word, locates
resources with different spellings
(Eg. American vs Australian)
genetic* AND child* Truncation locates resources
* containing all words beginning with the
root word (Eg. genetics, geneticist,
genetically AND childhood, children,
child)
(“population growth” AND Nesting locates the most relevant
HONES

() taiwan) AND health OR information first by putting greater

medicine emphasis on the terms in brackets
(Just like Order of Operations in
mathematics)
“game addiction” AND Weighting puts particular emphasis on
^ adolescent* AND (“mental one term over another in your search,
health”^5) prioritising the weighted term over the
other search terms in the string.