NestingorStringsearching is an advanced technique tomake searches more specific.This method is useful for:
- comprehensive searches
- building more complex searches
- multi-concept search strings
- topics where ideas or conceptscan be expressed in multiple ways.
Example:teenagers are alsodescribed as adolescents, youth, teens, or young adults.
- when you are interested in two different aspects of a topic.
Example:(symptoms OR treatments) AND diabetes
Nesting uses parentheses ()to dictate the order in which the Boolean operators will be carried out.Specifically, the search terms within parentheses are required to be searched first.
The most common use of nesting is to add multiplesearch terms in parenthesesusing theOR operator and linking those terms withother search terms using AND.
Example: (teenager OR teen OR adolescent OR youth OR "young adult") ANDdepression
Encasing the ORsearch string forcesthe computer to complete the OR search first then move on to the ANDsearch.
Brackets or double parentheses are used to enclose multiple strings to make them a single term.
Example:[(alcohol OR drug*) AND (teenagers OR adolescents)] AND anxiety
It is ofteneasy to do Boolean phrase searching from theAdvancedSearchmenu in a database. Specifythat you want your words searched as a phrase by choosing theBoolean phrase option,as in the example below:
The Boolean phrase created by the search engine isshown to the leftof your search results.
