Search Help

Search Tips

• The text search at the top of the home page allows you to enter a word, words or phrases in the text box. The search treats all words entered as a single phrase and the words in the phrase must appear in the same order to be a match.

  You can use AND, OR, commas and quotation marks in this search box to modify or simplify your search. This search returns web resources from the database in order of relevancy to your search term. Use the following hints when trying to narrow or modify your search.

  • Use AND to join two or more search words or phrases together.
    
    
  • Use OR to indicate only one of the search terms must be present in the search.
    
    
  • Use quotation marks around specific phrases you want to find.
  
  
• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
  
  
• You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.
  
  
• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for "Word for Windows", the results could give you "Word for Windows" and "Word and Windows", because "for" is a noise word and appears in the exception list.
  
  
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
  
  
• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (,), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (").
  
  
• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, "World-Wide Web" or "Web" searches for "World-Wide Web" or "Web".

Sample Searches

• Nursing Homes

  This would be treated as 2 separate words. To treat this as a phrase, type "Nursing Homes", putting quotation marks around the phrase.

• Nursing OR Homes

  This would be treated as 2 separate words. This would prompt search engines to look for "either/or" word. To narrow your search, you can type in one word at a time.

• Nursing AND Homes

  This would be treated as 2 separate words. This would prompt search engines to look for BOTH words simultaniously in a phrase.

• Combining Nursing and gender, age, race or ethnicity

  You can combine these words into a phrase by typing (Nursing and Gender), etc. Both would be returned in the search results. However, they may not describe what you are looking for. To ensure your search is narrow, put quotation marks around your search to make it "Nursing and Gender".