Help With Search Terms
Search terms may be combined using the following operators: and; or; not
The default operator is and. The following two examples will produce identical results.
Examples:
These queries match only interviews, and other documents which contain both the term "Rostov" and the term "University"
The and operator finds matches regardless of the order or location of the terms in the document, but you may wish to search for terms in relation to one another, or to eliminate terms from your search.
To do this, use the operators or, not, or enclose a phrase in quotation marks, as shown in the examples below.
The or operator will match either one term or another.
Examples:
This query will match documents in which either term appears. This strategy can be very useful when exact spellings are unknown, or when variant spellings exist.
The not operator will match one term and eliminate matches containing the second term.
Example:
This query will match documents in which the first term appears, and eliminate from the results any of those documents in which the second term also appears. This strategy can be useful in creating specificity to reduce the size of a result set. If the researcher is looking for documents relating to scientific apparatus for instance, this search will eliminate many pages about party apparatus.
To search for words next to one another in a phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks.
Example:
This query will match only documents in which the terms appear next to each other in the specified order. This strategy is useful in cases where words are used commonly separately, but can be highly specific if used together.
To search for words which have variant endings, use the wild card * (asterisk) for truncation.
Examples:
This query will retrieve documents in which the terms “kolkhos” or “kolkoz” appear, as well as their plurals and derivatives “kolkhoses,” “kolkhozniks,” etc.; similarly for “Ukraine” “Ukraina” “Ukrainian,” etc.
