Searching with Keywords and Boolean

You will need some keywords first before you get into academic databases. However, keyword searching in the humanities can be tricky. 

Some disciplines use "controlled vocabulary," where certain terms have a very specific meaning. For example, in Psychology, the word memory has a specific meaning (and specific sub-topics, like "working memory" or "long-term memory"). Medicine is another field with well-defined controlled vocabularies. 

However, in the humanities, the same word memory can pose a lot of problems. Do you mean "remembrance?" Or "nostalgia?" Or both? Or neither? What about a book of poetry that evokes a sense of memory, but doesn't ever use the word? 

These are useful for refining your search. A boolean operator gives instructions to the database search algorithm. You can narrow or expand your searches by using boolean operators.

This is useful for expanding your search. Adding an asterisk to a word root tells the database to search all possible endings for that word. For example: typing "child*" will search the terms children, childhood, and childlike. 

Be careful! You can definitely truncate too far (art* = artist, artwork, artichoke, arthur...)

This is useful for searching exact phrases. If you know that "Animal Farm" is a phrase, you should search for those two words together in quotations. This is particularly true if you know you are using a full-text database (like JSTOR or Project Muse). Otherwise, the database might search for the word animal somewhere in the full text, and the word farm somewhere in the full text. 

In this example, keywords are organized into three groups: (1) the book title, (2) the author name, and (3) a group of related concept terms. 

Note the use of truncation and quotation marks. Here, "politic*" searches words like political and politics; "socialis*" searches words like socialism, socialist, socialists, etc. 

Notice how the database supplies the Boolean term "AND" to combine the three groups of words together. Also note how related terms should be grouped using the Boolean term "OR." 

The above search tells the database:

"Find me materials that include the exact phrase "animal farm," AND ALSO the words george orwell, AND ALSO any one or more of the following words: politics or political or socialist or socialism or communist or communism or government..."