4.5: Combine Terms

Combine Terms

Look back at your Venn diagram. Let's use that as a translation device. So far, you've added the circles as separate searches. Each search will stay in your search history during the time you're using the database, but where that is depends on which database you're using. Once you find your search history, you'll need to know how to combine your terms.

To combine terms, you'll need to be able to answer how the terms relate:

• Would you be ok seeing articles that use either one or the other term? In my example, I'd be ok finding results on either emotion or affect. I'd be interested in results on either graduate students or doctoral students.
• Do you want to see how the terms relate to each other? In my example I want to find sources about both emotions and graduate students.

Here's a chart of whether to combine terms with AND or with OR:

Combine terms

How do your terms relate to each other?	Combining word to use
Synonyms or related terms	Use OR
Different concepts	Use AND
Exclude terms	Use NOT (rarely used)

Not: Usually, there's no need to connect using NOT. You can use this to connect a term that you do not want to get in your results. However, this is tricky. Sometimes, a relevant article might mention a term you're not interested in, but other aspects of the article would be interesting.¹

Venn diagram

For a visualization of when to use And or Or, we'll use our Venn diagram.

Remember that I'd mentioned not to label the intersection between circles. This intersection is just the AND combining the terms. We use OR between terms within the same circle.

Example: Combining terms \(\PageIndex{1}\)

When I was considering keywords, I thought of graduate students OR doctoral students.

Now, when I want to combine this concept with emotions, I can combine the following sets:

• (Graduate students OR doctoral students) AND
• (Emotions OR affect)

Activity: Combining terms \(\PageIndex{1}\)

In the last activity, you searched for one of your concepts as a keyword and again as a subject. Select whether the keyword or subject worked better for your search. Or, combine the two into one search, if you think they’re both useful. Do the same thing with a concept from another circle in your Venn diagram. Then combine the two searches together.

Don’t start reading through the citations yet. First note:

How many results do you have?

Add the number here:

Next Steps

In the next section, we'll discuss how many results is too many, and how to narrow effectively to find relevant sources. So don't look through your results yet! Read the next section first.

Note: The few times I've seen "not" be a useful connector tend to be when a researcher is utilizing a term differently from the dominant culture. For example, a student was doing their dissertation on sadism & masochism from the original usage when the terms first became used in psychological literature in the 1940s. Today's studies on these terms relate to sexuality. We created a large set with terms related to sexuality and combined it with sadism using not. However, the number of times I've used it has been quite rare.