Quiz: Page 1.b. Combine Keywords to Get Control of Your Results -- Nesting (Synonyms OR "Related Keywords")
- Due No due date
- Points 1
- Questions 1
- Time Limit None
Instructions
Nesting Using Parentheses
In the lesson, you also saw a search string technique called nesting. Nesting is necessary when you are adding synonyms or closely related keywords to your searches. I will use the term synonyms to refer to any set of keywords that are so closely related that you would be happy to find any one of them in your results, even if technically they do not mean the same thing. Nesting by using parentheses is the search string format that tells the database how to understand the relationships among your keywords.
How does using parentheses around your keywords help you to control your results?
You have to use parentheses for nesting your keywords anytime that you are searching for synonyms for any of your keywords. The reason you want to add synonyms to your searches is so that you can get all the relevant articles for your research question in one set of results. Instead of searching several times using different keywords, combining synonyms into a single search can save you time and frustration.
If you include synonyms in your searches without using parentheses for nesting, the database will not understand how to interpret your search string.
For example, if you were searching for articles about the relationship between trauma and child development, some synonyms to use would be infant, child, youth.
The following show you how to use those synonyms in a search:
trauma AND (infant OR child OR youth) is a string that will find articles that have the word trauma and either the word infant, the word child, or the word youth in them, so all of the results contain at least two of your keywords
trauma AND infant OR child OR youth is a string that will find articles that have the words trauma and infant in them as well as all the articles that have just the word youth and all of the articles that have just the word infants in them, so many of your results will only contain one of your keywords.
Articles that just have the word child or the word youth in them without the word trauma are probably not relevant to your research question, so you would have added a lot of articles to your results that you do not want.