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Archive
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Search Tips
A search can be as simple as a single word, for example:
education
It can be a phrase, such as:
"Prime Minister"
or a combination of words/phrases, such as:
"Prime Minister" AND education
You can join multiple search words
and phrases together into a single search statement using
search operators like
AND and
OR.
Enclose phrases in quotation marks, for example:
"life after death"
Use the quotation marks whether you are searching for the
phrase by itself, or as part of a longer search statement such as:
"eastern religions" AND "life after death"
If you aren't sure of how to spell a
word, or you want to search for variations of a common word
root, such as educator, education, educating, you can use two
special characters when you type your search.
Capitalization does not matter when you are typing your search.
For example, prime minister will
find the same documents as Prime Minister.
Spelling does matter; your search will fail or find the wrong
documents if you misspell one or more search terms.
If you are searching by an
Author or
Headline,
please use Advanced search.
Using Search Operators
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Operators let you connect multiple search words or phrases together into
a single search statement. The table below shows you what operators you
can use, provides a sample search for each, and tells you what the sample
search will find.
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Operator
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Sample Use
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Finds documents containing...
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| AND |
education AND internet
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education and internet anywhere in the document.
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| OR |
education OR internet
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education or internet, or both, anywhere in the entire document.
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| ANDNOT |
education ANDNOT internet
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education, but not internet.
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W/number
(WITHIN) |
education W/3 internet
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occurrences of education within three words of internet.
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NOT W/number
(NOT WITHIN) |
education NOT W/3 internet
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occurrences of education and internet at least four words apart.
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PRE/number
(PRECEDE BY) |
education PRE/3 internet
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occurrences of education preceding internet by up to three words.
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Using Special Characters
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There are two special characters you can use when you're unsure of a word's spelling,
or when you want to look for words sharing a common root or stem, such as
education and educator:
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| * |
Use the * character to search for words beginning
with a common word root, with any number of characters following.
For example,
operat*
will find documents containing:
operations,
operational, and
operator
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Extra tip: If you insert a "*" into the search for field and use the date range
option to select a specific date on the advanced search page, you'll be able browse
articles that appeared on that day.
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| ? |
Use the ? character to search for words with a specific
number of wildcard characters. Use one ? for each
character that you're unsure of. For example,
wom?n
will find documents containing:
woman,
women, and
womyn.
And
educat??
will find documents containing:
educated and
educator
.
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