Hints for Improving Your Basic Search

• Focus your search by using Boolean operators
• Use phrases to refine your search
• Narrow your results by searching abstracts and citations only

Focusing your Search by Using Boolean Operators

You can use special terms, called Boolean operators, to build searches that combine and exclude the words and phrases that make up your search.

Examples

Use OR to find documents that contain any one of several search terms:

Internet OR education finds documents mentioning the Internet, as well as documents mentioning education, or both.

Use AND to find documents containing two or more search terms:

Internet AND education finds documents mentioning the Internet and education.

Use AND NOT to exclude a search term:

Internet AND NOT education finds documents regarding the Internet, removing those documents mentioning education.

For more information, see Operators.

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Using Phrases to Refine Your Search

If you're searching for a specific phrase, place your phrase in quotation marks (" "). This lets ProQuest know you're looking for documents where the words appear exactly in order.

Example

If you're searching for information on animal hospitals, type the following:

"small animal hospital"

The following similar search yields very different results:

small animal AND hospital

The second search finds any document in which both "small animal" and "hospital" appear within 250-words of one another. These results could include documents about the use of dogs and cats in hospitals for therapy.

The first search find records where the words "small animal hospital" occur in that order, not separated by other words. Therefore, the results of the first search are likely to include only documents dealing with veterinary care.

If your phrase is only two words long, ProQuest will automatically treat it as a phrase (as if it were in quotation marks). If your phrase is three words or longer, you must use quotation marks. Otherwise, ProQuest will treat the phrase as if the words were joined by AND, for example "small AND animal AND hospital."

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Narrowing Your Results by Searching Abstracts and Citations Only

When you choose document text from the Search in drop-down on the Basic Search page, ProQuest searches the title, the abstract, and the complete text of each document.

You can also focus your search results by limiting it to the abstracts and citations of documents. Select Citations and abstracts from the drop-down menu to search these nine document index fields only:

• Abstract
• Document Title
• Author
• Company
• Geographical Name
• Personal Name
• Product Name
• Publication Name (Source)
• Subject

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