To form a search statement, we can combine boolean operators with keywords.
To use an example, let's look at the issue of - youth targeted campaigns in the area of eating disorders.
1. First, identify your concepts! We can identify 3 concepts - youth, campaign, and eating disorder.
2. Identify if there are any synonyms. Synonyms can act as keywords when forming a search statement. For example:
| A | B | C |
| youth | campaign | eating disorder |
| teenager | marketing | anorexia |
| young people | promotion | bulimia |
3.Use and to combine different concepts, e.g. Youth and campaign and "eating disorder"
4. Use or to combine similar concepts, and use brackets () to group these synonyms together, e.g. (youth or teen*)
5. Use * to find variant forms of the root word, e.g. teen* will retrieve teen, teens, teenagers, teenage..
6. Use " " when searching for common phrases or theories, e.g. "eating disorder"
Thus, a possible search statement we can use in this example is:
(anorexi* OR bulimi* OR "eat* disorder") AND (campaign OR marketing) AND (youth OR teen* OR young)
Eg.
Youth AND anorexia
Youth AND "eating disorder"
Eg.
"Eating disorder" OR anorexia OR bulimia
Campaign OR marketing
Truncation
The symbol to use for truncation is the asterisk *. Truncation will retrieve the variant forms of a word & the variant spelling
example:
colo*r = colour, color
politic* = politics, politically, political…
anorex* = anorexia, anorexic
Phrase Search
The symbol to use for phrase search is quotation marks " " .
example:
"eating disorder" , "weight management"
Search Term Grouping
Use parentheses ( ) for grouping similar or related words
example:
youth AND campaign AND (anorexia OR bulimia)
Eg.
"Eating disorder" NOT anorexia