More effective searching 

Using Boolean search operators

We’ve already touched upon Boolean searching on the previous page.  If we take the main search example we used, we can convert it into a proper Boolean search string – that all databases will recognise and respond to – by adding in the AND operators:

“corporate social responsibility” AND “international business” AND sustainability

The above search string would be recognised by any of our individual databases, or even Google Scholar.

You can combine an AND search with an OR search, by including parentheses (round brackets like these) around the OR parts of your search.  In the example below, the system will look for anything containing any of the words in the OR part of the search as well as all the other terms included.

“corporate social responsibility” AND “international business” AND sustainability AND (political OR economic OR social OR technological OR legal OR environmental)

You could even expand some of the other terms:

(CSR OR “corporate social responsibility”) AND (“international business” OR “global business”) AND sustainability AND (political OR economic OR social OR technological OR legal OR environmental)

To narrow down the results further, you could, for example, add AND “building industry”

Using truncation

Another useful way of broadening a search is to use what is called ‘truncation.’  In effect, you can chop off a search term and replace the removed letters with an asterisk.  For example, searching for criminolog* will find anything containing any of the words starting with that stem (criminology, criminological, criminologist or criminologists).  This saves you from having to type in all the alternatives as part of an ‘OR’ search.

Using wildcards

You can also replace letters inside a search term, using “wildcards”.  Where there are alternative spellings for words like organisation/organization or behaviour/behavior, you can replace letters with an asterisk and the system will search for anything with either spelling.

• Organi*ation will search for organisation OR organization
• behavi*r will search for behaviour OR behavior

A word of warning: the main search in LibrarySearch cannot cope with too many wildcards or truncated items in a Boolean search at one time and will simply find no results.  However, if you enter the same search into, say, Sage Journals, or Taylor and Francis Online, or Google Scholar, you might still get some results.