Information Literacy Skills > Combining keywords

Introduction

You search an electronic information source by typing in keywords which describe your topic. The source tries to match these with its own keywords. It then provides you with information which matches your keywords. This works well and quickly for a simple search. However when you are looking for very specific information not only do you need to think carefully about the keywords, you will need to think how they are best combined.

When you ask a knowledgeable person a question, you are able to use complex language to refine your request. For instance, you might say to a travel agent, "I am looking for information about holidays in the Greek Islands. I don't want to go to Corfu because I've already been there." An electronic source cannot cope with this sort of complexity.

You do however, have one method that you can use with an electronic source in order to make your question more exact. This is Boolean logic and it has got to do with how your keywords are combined. If do not use this feature then you are leaving the information source to make its own assumptions about how to combine the keywords.

When you input a set of keywords:

• are you looking only for results which include all the keywords?
• would results with only some of the keywords be useful?
• would you like to omit results that had a particular word?

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