Kayleigh Ferguson
University College Dublin | Long Island University
Read on for information retrieval and search hacks from your friendly neighbourhood librarian! These insights into Boolean Operators, Advanced Search Parameters, and Digital Object Identifiers will eliminate hours spent tracking down papers on JSTOR, Google, WorldCat, and a host of search engines and databases.
Boolean Operators
So-called because they’re based on algebraic sets developed by mathematician George Boole, these handy little search limiters are paramount for refining and specifying online searches. Most search fields (except Spotify - I’ve tried) follow Boolean logic, and wide search engines like Google and institution-specific public access catalogues (PACs or OPACs) all adhere to the same standards, making these universally useful.
Boolean operators are basically search term modifiers that alter how specific your search is read by a database or catalogue. Some symbols will emphasize certain terms or phrases or could eliminate others, either broadening or narrowing down your search to what is really relevant. Someone in my reference services class asked why us ‘humanities people’ are so obsessed with JSTOR, so I’ll use that database as an example here.
If I want articles on Palestrina’s motets from the sixteenth century and I type this in, the JSTOR database will pull up results for each of those four words individually and then combine them to give me 1,164 hits on everything it has relating to each of them; it will pull anything tagged as “Palestrina” (not just the specific composer, but anyone with the name), and so on. This gives me what I need, but it makes it harder to find it and I have to do some extra legwork to make sure it’s relevant. Let’s try it this way:
We’re getting there. When you put search terms or phrases in quotation marks (or sometimes parentheses), the search engine will register that as unchangeable - “sixteenth” and “century,” previously considered two separate terms by the database, are now one term and only results containing the two words next to each other will be pulled for you. If you were to look up Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina, the most relevant hits would be what you’re looking for, yes, but engines like Google or anything less humanities-based will bring up results for Giovanni, Pierluigi, and Palestrina all separately. Google knows a lot of Giovannis, I’ve discovered. However, if you type “Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina,” it’ll only return your man specifically. Much cleaner.
Just as you can use + or AND (yes, it has to be all caps - I prefer the addition symbol because I don’t feel like it’s shouting at me), you can use - or NOT.
Not sure why you’d be looking up Palestrina without his music, but you get the point. We started with 1,164 hits and we’re down to 29. This is a pretty healthy number for a database like JSTOR.
Here is a table of Boolean operators and their functions laid out for you:
‘AND’ will pull up articles that include both Palestrina and the Council of Trent; ‘OR’ will retrieve those with either Palestrina or the Council of Trent, maybe both, maybe not; ‘NOT’ will pull up Palestrina and completely exclude the Council of Trent (or vice versa); NEAR will produce articles on both so long as they are relatively close to each other in a sentence.
As ridiculous as the search we just performed was, this article will at least mention both Palestrina and the Council of Trent but not music. While we’re here, take notice of the string of numbers following “DOI:” and remember that it’s there (it’s a surprise tool that will help us later).
Advanced Search Parameters
Say instead that you know the name (or, like, part of the name or the author but not the name) of a specific article and don’t need to do a broad search for sources.
This is overwhelming. Again, without operators, the results searched for “art” and “hearing” separately and brought you everything that contains both or either of those words. This is useless if you need a very specific source or edition of something and can’t be sure they line up.
We know that ‘The Art of Hearing’ was the heading of the title of the article we just retrieved, so let’s try this:
When we punch in the parameters to search by title - ti: - followed by our Boolean search term in parentheses, the first result is the article we were looking for. The same can be done for various search fields—keyword, author, subject, etc.—and this is the easiest and most straightforward way to do an advanced search by field directly in the search bar.
These tags are much more common in databases like WorldCat, and not everyone readily remembers the shorthand for the field, but the same concept is applied in the advanced search feature of just about every database or catalogue.
The drop-down boxes in JSTOR’s advanced search options will give you the option to apply different operators to different fields - title, keyword, author, caption, and so on - if you aren’t certain of writing them in yourself.
Digital Object Identifiers
Remember that DOI number on the article we chose? In the same way physical and electronic book sources all have very specific ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) to identify them by edition, electronic articles have DOI numbers. This is handy for finding you a very specific article access point (i.e. JSTOR) without having to search for the article in something like Google to find its database or owner. Sometimes, especially for born-digital materials, citing where you accessed the source is necessary for credibility, but a lot of us borrow, download, or pirate (I said it) articles from wherever we can access or afford them. To make sure you have the right source from a credible database and to be able to cite it, plug the DOI (usually found at the very bottom page of the title or cover of an article) into the search bar at <doi.org>.
This links us directly back to the article as we found it on JSTOR, and there you have it.