A technique you can use is the words AND and OR. These are what we call Boolean operators in academic terminology. They are used to combine different search terms.

If you are using Oria, you can use the Norwegian words OG and ELLER, but in most cases you will use the English terms AND and OR when searching.

You can use these operators when you want to narrow (limit) or broaden your search. They can help ensure that you do not miss important information by allowing you to include additional terms, or exclude terms that are not relevant or of interest.

We will now go through the different search operators.


AND	OR

AND

AND is used to limit the number of results and narrow down the topic, and is applied by combining two or more search terms with AND.


AND

When you search in almost any database or use a search engine like Google, an invisible AND is automatically added between the words you choose to search for. This means that your results will include only those sources that contain all the terms you have used—each of the words must be present in the document or other material you find.

Let’s say you are looking for information about opportunities for studying in Norway. The simplest search would be studying norway. What you are actually searching for, however, is studying AND norway, which will return results that include sources containing both the words studying and Norway.

OR

OR is used to broaden the search.

To sirkler (rød og beige) overlapper delvis. Det overlappende feltets farge er fargen man får når rød og beige blandes.

OR

This is done by adding more search terms, combined with OR. This is usually done when you have synonyms, and to make sure you do not miss anything important and relevant.

When you use OR between different search terms and synonyms, you broaden your search to include all the terms together or individually. It does not matter whether the search terms appear in the same source or whether only one or more of them are present. The goal of using OR is to ensure that you do not miss anything important.

Let’s say you are again searching for studying. It can then be useful to consider whether there are other relevant terms. Think about what it means to study, and which synonyms and related search terms you can use.

For example:
studying OR "higher education" OR university OR college OR studies

NOT

NOT is used when you want to reduce the number of results and remove irrelevant ones, but keep in mind that you may also miss useful sources if you exclude too many search terms.

NOT can be used, for example, when you have a search term that has multiple meanings, such as the word cloud. A cloud can refer to clouds in the sky, or to cloud storage or cloud-based services. This means that if you are looking for information about clouds in the context of weather and rain, and you are getting a large number of results about cloud storage and digital services, it may be useful to exclude terms such as cloud storage, data*, and digital*.

For example:
cloud* NOT (cloud storage OR data* OR digital*).

Here, we are searching for everything that contains the word cloud, but excluding results that include cloud storage, words starting with data* or words starting with digital*.

Remember that you should be cautious when choosing to use the NOT operator, as it may cause you to exclude sources that could be relevant. Do not use it unless you are certain that it will be beneficial and only exclude unnecessary sources.


NOT