Question
How does Boolean searching help us in our OT practice?
Answer
I do lean on Boolean operators or Boolean search terminology. This is the use of AND, OR, or NOT to broaden or narrow your search. For keyword searching again, you think of a topic, you plug it in the box, and hit search. It is quick. It is basic, but it is not intuitive. If you put occupation into a search terminology box, it is not going to know that you mean occupation the way we know occupation from the practice framework as therapists. It will think of occupation as in occupying something like land or occupation as a job or vocation. A database is not smart enough or intuitive enough to think of the meaning behind that word. We need to help it. One of the ways is by adding more terms. If we put in the words occupational therapy and we want those terms together, you can use quotation marks to chunk them together, and the database will search for them together as one term.
Here is an example for using the Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT. Using the example of stroke, you may want to learn about cerebellar stroke. You are going to plug into the box stroke AND cerebellum. It has to look for those two things together. It will not produce all the results from stroke and cerebellum separately. Using the AND operator will narrow your results. Also, you want to use the fewest number of terms in that search box to get the most information. The more you plug in, sometimes it confuses the database or search engine. If you want to use OR, remember how I said before that the thesaurus may not recognize stroke as a term, but it might like cerebrovascular accident. If you put in your search engine stroke, you may be missing out on all the information and articles that use cerebrovascular accident instead. Using the term OR will broaden your results. If you type in stroke or cerebrovascular accident, it will encompass all of those things. You can also use the quotation marks to chunk together “cerebrovascular accident” and the search engine will only look for those terms together. If you have synonyms or closely related words, you will want to use the OR operator. To go back to the previous example, I am looking for not just stroke or CVA, but a cerebellar CVA. Using both the AND and OR operators, I would use cerebellum AND “stroke OR cerebrovascular accident”. At this point, I am ensuring that I am only going to see cerebellar stroke information.
