Boolean searching allows you to customize how you search for things in academic databases, and it's based on a few key pieces of syntax: AND, OR, NOT, (), and "". 

AND

When you put two terms into an academic database, AND is usually implied: You usually want both words in Muslim women to appear in your search results. You could just as easily write:

Muslim AND women

OR and ""

But let's say that I want to find something about childhood in revolutionary America. If I want articles that cover young children and teenagers/adolescents I can do the following:

children OR adolescents AND "revolutionary America"

What this tells my database is that I don't care which term appears in the results. I just want one of them. In addition, I want revolutionary America to be searched as a phrase. (This also works in Google with song lyrics.)

NOT

What if I'm looking for women in STEM (science, engineering, mathematics, and technology) fields, though? Try it. You'll see a lot of resources on stem cells. This is where the NOT operator is helpful:

women stem NOT cell NOT "clinical trial" NOT "stem cells"

When you have a large number of hit results, there are a few tips and tricks to narrow down the search to a more manageable amount of results:

• Search for multiple keywords instead of a single word
• Limit the time period of publication
• Use the "subject" and/or "discipline" facet on the left-hand side of most databases to select the subject headings that relate most to your topic