Search Operators & Search Tips

Boolean Operators

Boolean Operator	When to use	Example
AND	When searching for records that contain all the keywords used	education AND Singapore will retrieve records with Singapore and education in the record
OR	When searching for records that contain one or more of the keywords used	Holland OR Netherlands will retrieve records with Holland and/or Netherlands in the record
NOT	When excluding records with certain keywords	tennis NOT table will retrieve records with tennis but not table tennis
XOR	When searching for records matching any of the keywords but not both	dogs XOR cats will retrieve records with dogs only or records with cats only

Truncation and Wildcard (Substitution)

Function	Symbol	Example	When to use	Searches for
Truncation	$	teach$	When searching keywords containing a common word root with any number of characters following the root	Teach, teaches, teacher, teachers, teaching, etc.
Wildcard (Substitution)	?	organi?ation	When searching keywords with variant spellings	organization or organisation

Nesting

Nesting groups together concepts that are alike and instructs the search engine to search the terms in the parentheses first (e.g. stress and (adolescents or teenagers) will retrieve items on stress and adolescents as well as items on stress and teenagers).

Phrase searching

Use single quotes for phrase search (e.g. 'creative thinking').

Stop Words

The search will ignore the stop words (articles, prepositions, or conjunctions, such as a, an, as, at, be, but, by, do, for, if, in, it, of, on, the, and to, among others). If you wish to include the stop words in your search, enclose your expression in double quotes (e.g. "war and peace").

Operator Precedence

The search statement is processed from left to right except when parentheses are used. Commands in the innermost set of parentheses will be executed first. Order of processing for Boolean operators:

AND, NOT
XOR, OR

Help

Click on Help or contact the Service Point (Level 2, Library) if you need help with your search.
Telephone: 67903626
Email: libris@nie.edu.sg

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Last updated: December 6, 2017

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Mailing Address Library and Information Services Centre (LIBRIS) National Institute of Education 1 Nanyang Walk Singapore 637616
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