Discover now uses uppercase OR

April 29, 2013

Discover and the other EBSCOhost databases now require OR to be in uppercase/capitals when searching for alternative terms.

So for example you could look for: teenagers OR adolescents OR youth

This applies to most search tools, including the Library Catalogue, Google Scholar, many other article databases, and Google.

If you don’t use capitals, the search tools will try to look for ‘or’ as one of your keywords, which makes a bit of a mess of your search. If in doubt, look at the Help screen for the tool you’re in. Other operator words (AND, NOT) should also be in capitals.

Find out more about how you can use OR and other operator words with either single or multiple search boxes, in our short demonstration on Creating a Search Strategy.

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