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GetRef EDINA
Page: 9 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 »  

Excluding irrelevant content from your search

The term 'NOT' excludes a word from the results set. For example, if you search for

School NOT Nursery

All of the results should contain the word school but none of them will contain the word 'nursery'. The shaded areas in Figure 3 shows the documents retrieved using this search term.

Figure 3: Set containing School NOT Nursery

Figure 3: Set containing School NOT Nursery

Additional operators allow you to make your search even more precise. Details of these can be found in the help section of the database that you use.


Page: 9 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 »