CIOS Journals Index Databases Coverage Information
Operators that expand searches:
- Wildcard searches. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard.
Attach an asterisk to a search term and it matches any text that
follows. For example: searching for "rhet*" matches "rhetorical",
"rhetoric", "rhetoric of science", etc.
- Conflation. Use the squiggle or tilde (~) character
to find forms of a word. This is different than in wildcard searches.
For example, searching for "post~" will find "post", "posted", "posts",
"posting" but not "post-haste", "post mortem", or "postulate". These
latter three terms would be matched with a wildcard search for "post*"
but not with a conflation search for "post~". Beware, however, that
there are limits to the capabilities of conflation searches. They
cannot find all grammatical forms. For example, searching for "hold~",
will match "holding" and "holds" but will not match "held".
Positional operators
- "Followed by". Use elipses (...) between two terms to
indicate that both terms must appear in the text, but the first term
must occur somewhere before the second.
- "Word proximity". Placing a number between forward
slashes indicates that the search terms must be located within so many
words of each other. For example, "organizational /10/ network" would
return only those items that contain the word "organizational" within
ten words of the word "network".
Boolean (Logical) Operators
- "AND Searches". The AND operator can be placed between
two words or phrases and locates all documents that contain both the
first word or phrase and the other word or phrase.
- "NOT Searches". The NOT operator can be placed between
two terms, locating all items that contain the first word or phrase
but not the second.
- "XOR Searches". The XOR operator means that you wish to find
either one or the other term but not both.
- "OR Searches" . Locates all items that contain either one word
or phrase or the other word or phrase.
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