Resources to support the VU Bachelor of Biomedical Science & Bachelor of Biomedicine courses
Boolean Operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT used in library databases that can make searches more precise, and save you time by removing the need to go through all the search results in order to find the most relevant articles. For example, when searching on the topic of diabetes mellitus (T2DM) related to obesity among the elderly and investigating the interrelation between genes and environmental factors in type 2 diabetes, you could apply the following terms and operators:
AND narrows the search resulting in more focused results, for instance, searching for “obesity” AND "diabetes", all articles in your result will include both concepts (keywords)
OR broadens the search by instructing the database to search for any of the words, which is particularly useful for synonyms or related terms, i.e. “geriatric” OR “elderly” OR “senior”
NOT narrows the search by instructing the database to remove all unnecessary search results, for example “cloning” NOT “sheep”
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