Use AND or OR to combine keywords in any order. Use AND NOT to exclude words.

Example : stocks and bonds
Example : oil and not gasoline

Use NEAR to locate records that contain your keywords or phrases within 10 words of each other.  The WITHIN operator allows you to specify the maximum numbers of words that may appear between the keywords.

Example : Samuel near Clemens
Example:  market within 3 share

Search for phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks.

Example: “Financial Accounting Standards Board”

Truncation allows you to search the ‘root’ form of a word with all its different endings.  An asterisk ‘*’ added to the end of a root word consisting of at least two letters will match up to five characters.  Using two asterisks ‘**’ will match any number of characters.  An asterisk ‘*” may also be embedded in a word.

Example: comput* will match computer and computing but not computation.
Example: comput** will match computer, computing, and computation.
Example: colo*r will match both “color” and “colour”.

Use a question mark ‘?’ to replace a single character anywhere within a word.

Example:  wom?n will match woman and women.
Example:  boston and 18?? will find boston and any year in the 1800’s.

Use field searching to limit your search to a particular field such as author, title, periodical title, subject, call number or ISBN/ISSN number.