#Boolean search not full

Media AND violence: only those results that contain both media and violence will appear in your search results list. Using the Boolean command AND in your search tells the search engine to give you results that contain all of the words you have entered. Other commands include parentheses, truncation, and phrases. The most popular Boolean commands are AND, OR, and NOT. OR 100’ to be used for those service providers where the search interface does not use the # symbol.Boolean is a set of commands that can be used in almost every search engine, database, or online catalogue. Having typed the string with the # symbols as above, a second string can be generated by globally replacing the # symbol with nothing to create the string ‘1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 ….

#Boolean search not full

For those service providers where this is not possible, including The Cochrane Library for searches of CENTRAL, it has been recommended that the search string above could be typed in full and saved, for example, as a Word document and the requisite number of combinations copied and pasted into the search as required. For example, in Ovid it is possible to combine sets using the syntax ‘or/1-100’. Some service providers offer alternatives to this. It can be tedious to type in the combinations of these search sets, for example as ‘#1 OR #2 OR #3 OR #4 …. Searches for Cochrane reviews can be extremely long, often including over 100 search statements. For example, when searching for records indexed as female, ‘NOT male’ would remove any record that was about both males and females. The ‘NOT’ operator should be avoided where possible to avoid the danger of inadvertently removing from the search set records that are relevant. A possible remedy is to omit one of the three sets of terms and decide which records to check on the basis of the number retrieved and the time available to check them.

For example, if an index term has not been added to the record for the intervention and the intervention is not mentioned in the title and abstract, the article would be missed. A note of caution about this approach is warranted however: if an article does not contain at least one term from each of the three sets, it will not be identified. This final step of joining the three sets with the ‘AND’ operator limits the retrieved set to articles of the appropriate study design that address both the health condition of interest and the intervention(s) to be evaluated. These three sets of terms can then be joined together with the ‘AND’ operator. Sets of terms should usually be developed for the healthcare condition, intervention(s) and study design. This means articles will be retrieved that contain at least one of these search terms. 6.4.7 Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT)Ī search strategy should build up the controlled vocabulary terms, text words, synonyms and related terms for each concept at a time, joining together each of the terms within each concept with the Boolean ‘OR’ operator: see demonstration search strategy ( Figure 6.4.a). For the current version, please go to /handbook/current or search for this chapter here. This is an archived version of the Handbook.