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Search Operators

How to use Boolean operators and more to combine terms in your database and Google searches.

Proximity Searches

Proximity searches are a way to search for words near each other.

We use quotation marks to search for phrases, signalling to the database that we want these words to be searched next to each other.  If we don't put quotation marks around "social anxiety", the database will search the words separately, and they might be sentences apart. Whenever you search for phrases, you will want to put them in quotation marks.

We can also search for words close together, but not necessarily next to each other. Theses are types of proximity operators, and each database uses different wording and syntax to describe this type of search. Please see below for how different databases allow this type of proximity searching.