Guides: Psyc 100 &amp; 101: Dianne Crisp: Searching with AND & OR

Combining keywords with AND & OR

You can use the search commands AND and OR in library databases like PsycInfo to refine your results. When you capitalize these words in your search the database recognizes these as words that tell it to perform a certain action rather than words to find in the articles contained within the database.

AND narrows: used between keywords tells the database to limit your search to results that mention all of your keywords. AND is best applied between search bars to join unrelated keywords and will narrow your search.
OR expands: used between keywords tells the database to find results that mention any of your keywords. OR is particularly useful when searching for synonyms and related terms and will broaden your search.

Examples:

children OR adolescents	Finds results that mention either the word children or the word adolescents. Results may include only one of the search terms or both.
children AND fatigue	Find results that mention both the word children and the word fatigue.

Watch the videos below to learn more.