Boolean Operators

Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT, are used to combine your keywords. 

AND is used to connect different concepts: food production AND "social justice"

Using AND will narrow your search, because the database is searching for sources that contain all the keywords.

OR is used to connect similar concepts: food production OR farming OR agriculture

Using OR to connect similar words will broaden your search, because the database is searching for sources that contain at least one of the keywords.

NOT will remove any search results that contain a particular keyword: food production NOT "landscaping" 

Using NOT will decrease the number of search results, or narrow our search, because the database will exclude resources with the specified keyword(s) from the results list. 

Phrase Searching

Enclose your keywords in quotation marks to search for an exact phrase: :"food justice" OR "food sovereignty"

Truncation

Truncation allows you to account for words with variations.

The asterisk(*) is commonly used to truncate a keyword. Place the * where you would like to account for variation: 

         activis* will retrieve: activism, activist, activists