For instance, if you were looking for documents concerning dogs but did not want any mention of cats, you would enter dogs NOT cats . Using NOT also enhances the precision of your search and , thus, reduces the number of documents retrieved. You may combine more than one Boolean operator in a search string using a technique called nesting . Once the query contained in parenetheses has been completed additional boolean operators may be applied to the results. The following techniques are NOT available when using HamLET , our online catalog, but they are available on many other electronic databases.
Phrase searching Most of the popular Internet search tools permit some form of phrase searching .
This option allows you to specify that your terms must appear adjacent to one another and in the exact order in which they were entered. This is helpful when looking for names of people or organizations. Proximity Some databases allow you to use proximity searching to insist that the search terms appear close to one another within the document. Wildcard This technique is similar to truncation in that it allows the insertion of a character to retrieve variant forms of that word. The difference is that the wildcard character may be inserted within the word.