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GetRef EDINA

How information is structured and made available in the real world

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Page: 7 of 12 Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Information Literacy Page 3: Discovering what information is available Page 4: Getting hold of the information you need Page 5: Search strategies Page 6: Effective searching - structured databases Page 7: Casting the net wide Page 8: Narrowing the field Page 9: Excluding irrelevant content from your search Page 10: Boolean operators and search engines Page 11: Phrase in search engines Page 12: Information resources after you graduate « Prev | Next »  

Casting the net wide

The term 'OR' in a search retrieves any document that has at least one of the search terms. For example, if you search for

School OR College

You will find all documents that contain the word school and all documents that contain the word 'college'. Figure 1 shows the set of documents containing the word 'school' and the set containing word 'college'. The shaded area shows documents retrieved by the search term 'school OR college'.

Figure 1: Set containing School OR College

Figure 1: Set containing School OR College
Page: 7 of 12 Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Information Literacy Page 3: Discovering what information is available Page 4: Getting hold of the information you need Page 5: Search strategies Page 6: Effective searching - structured databases Page 7: Casting the net wide Page 8: Narrowing the field Page 9: Excluding irrelevant content from your search Page 10: Boolean operators and search engines Page 11: Phrase in search engines Page 12: Information resources after you graduate « Prev | Next »  
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