Oct 23, 2018•Knowledge
Oct 23, 2018•Knowledge
EBSCOadmin includes a setting that allows administrators to set EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) profiles to handle the words and, or, not as Boolean Operators only when they are entered as all capital letters (AND, OR, NOT.)
An administrator may choose to modify this setting to ensure that users searching for titles or phrases not enclosed in quotations and have these words included do not return poor or zero results.
For example:
In the phrase "to be or not to be," or and not would be treated as Boolean Operators and impact the search results. When this EBSCOadmin setting is enabled, or and not are treated as part of the phrase and not as Booleans because they were not entered in capital letters.
If a user searches for the book title "Death be not Proud," not is treated as a Boolean Operator causing the book to be excluded from the result list. When this EBSCOadmin setting is enabled, not is treated as part of the phrase and the title is included in the result list.
To modify this setting in EBSCOadmin:
Log in to EBSCOadmin at http://eadmin.ebscohost.com/.
Choose the desired EDS profile from the Choose Profile drop-down menu.
On the Searching sub-tab, set Require uppercase Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to Yes.
Click Submit to save your changes.
When searching using parentheses (aka "nesting") you must use a Boolean operator. If a Boolean operator is not included, the search engine cannot determine which operation to process first, causing the search to fail.
If you want to search for an exact phrase that includes parentheses, you should enclose your entire phrase in quotation marks. For example, to search for the following phrase:
English (Second Language)
Enter the following in the Find field:
“English (Second Language)”
Boolean logic defines logical relationships between terms in a search. The Boolean search operators are and, or and not. You can use these operators to create a very broad or very narrow search.
Note: When executing a search, And takes precedence over Or.
The following table illustrates the operation of Boolean terms:
| And | Or | Not |
| Each result contains all search terms. | Each result contains at least one search term. | Results do not contain the specified terms. |
| The search heart and lung finds items that contain both heart and lung. | The search heart or lung finds items that contain either heart or items that contain lung. | The search heart not lung finds items that contain heart but do not contain lung. |
To make even better use of Boolean operators, you can use parentheses to nest query terms within other query terms.
You can enclose search terms and their operators in parentheses to specify the order in which they are interpreted. Information within parentheses is read first, then information outside parentheses is read next. For example,
When you enter (mouse OR rat) AND trap, the search engine retrieves results containing the word mouse or the word rat together with the word trap in the fields searched by default.
If there are nested parentheses, the search engine processes the innermost parenthetical expression first, then the next, and so on until the entire query has been interpreted. For example,
((mouse OR rat) AND trap) OR mousetrap
If the Boolean queries do not include parentheses, mouse OR rat AND trap NOT mousetrap, the search engine will follow an order of operations like in math where AND and NOT are considered multiplication and are processed first, followed by the OR clause which is addition. Effectively, the search engine processes mouse OR rat AND trap NOT mousetrap as though the query has parentheses in the following places: mouse OR ((rat AND trap) NOT mousetrap)
When Boolean operators are contained within a phrase that is enclosed in quotation marks, the operator is treated as a stop word. When this is the case, any single word will be searched for in its place.