Keyword Searching

About Searchable Fields

A keyword search can find words and phrases anywhere within an author, title, contents, series, publisher or subject field. A keyword search is the only way to find a chapter author or chapter title within a table of contents note.

Numerical fields such as call number, ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) are not keyword searchable. Keyword searches do not search on cross-references that are available in author, title, and subject searches.

Phrases

Adjacent words are searched together as a phrase. With the exception of the initial articles in titles, include incidental words in your phrase search.

tragic choices	finds the complete phrase
tying the knot	"the" must be included in the search
"law and economics"	put the phrase in quotes if it includes an operator or proximity connector.

Operators (AND, OR, AND NOT)

Use operators to specify the relationship between the words or phrases that are being searched. Use parentheses when using more than one operator in your search.

• AND - to specify words and phrases that must be in your results but in any order.
• OR - to specify groups of words or synonyms, any one of which must be in your search results.
• AND NOT - excludes words or phrases from your results, but do so with caution.

torts and environment	finds items with both words
(atomic or nuclear) weapons	finds "atomic weapons" or "nuclear weapons"
marriage and not contract	to exclude certain words or phrases

Use proximity connectors to specify the relationship between the words or phrases that are being searched. Use "near" to specify words that are within 10 words each other, in any order. Use "within #", where # is any number you chose, to specify that the words occur within # of each other, in any order. The value of # has no limit.

marketing near (plan or plans or planning or strategy)

politics within 3 (plan or plans or planning or strategy)

 

Use truncation to find words for which there are variations in spelling or alternate endings. Any word that has two or more characters can be right-hand truncated. Use a single asterisk * to match 1-5 characters and a double asterisk ** for open-ended truncation.

radio*	finds "radio" and "radios," but not "radioactive"
comput**	finds any word beginning with "comput"
wom*n and lab*r	finds women or woman and labor or labour

Include periods when they appear within an abbreviation. You may also have to search for the abbreviation without periods as well as the spelled out form to find all items. In the examples below, the OR connector is used find all abbreviated and spelled out forms.

u.s.a. or usa or united states of america

fbi or f.b.i. or federal bureau of investigation

Field searching allows you to do a "free-text" search within a specific field, such as author or title. Words are searched in all fields unless fields are specified. The fields that are available for searching are a:(author), t:(title), s:(subject), and n: which searches notes, contents notes, and specially formatted table of contents. To search a specific field, type the single letter field label followed a colon and the search word(s). Be sure to use a connector between the different elements of your search.

a:koh and a:hathaway	finds items by joint authors
a:ackerman and t:liberties	combines author and title words
a:ellickson and s:property	combines author and subject

 

If your search retrieves too many items, click on the modify search button  . This will return you to the Keyword Search screen so you can add additional words to your search or select various criteria to limit your search.

Use the pull-down menu to limit your search to one most frequently represented languages in the catalog.

If you need to limit your search to a language not on the menu, use the appropriate three-letter language code appended to the prefix "lang:lang" as in the examples below. A list of standard three-letter language codes can be found by following this link. Not all languages are available in this Library.

lang:langheb	finds all Hebrew language material
law and lang:langchi	finds Chinese language material containing keyword law