Searches 2 - OR, AND, Grouping (Factory Farms)

In Searches 1 I used the CQ Researcher article 'Factory Farms' to develop and truncate keywords:
Concept 1: factory farm*, CAFO*, concentrated animal feeding operation*, livestock
Concept 2: environment*, waste, pollut*
- now I'll put them together into searches for EBSCOhost and ProQuest.

OR (Broadening the Search) - When more than one keyword represents a concept put the word ‘OR’ between them; this tells the database to retrieve any article with at least one of those keywords. For instance:
factory farm* OR concentrated animal feeding operation*

AND (Narrowing the Search) - With two concepts that together represent the topic, put together keywords for each concept with 'AND' between them; this tells the database to retrieve only articles that have both keywords. For instance:
factory farm* AND pollut*

Grouping - Most of our databases provide multiple lines to construct searches. Putting ‘factory farm* OR concentrated animal feeding operation*' on the first line, ‘waste or environment* or pollut*’ on the second line, and leaving ‘AND’ between the lines tells the database to search each concept separately and then narrow them together.


If we only have a single search line we accomplish the same thing by using parentheses - and in fact the databases will translate the search that way. Here is a link to this search in ProQuest:

(factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation*) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)

And here is a link to the search in EBSCOhost:
(factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation*) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)

Next we'll refine our search using the subjects in the databases that match our topic.