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PAC Search Tips
General Search Hints
Capitalization
- The PAC is not case sensitive. Searches may be entered in UPPERCASE, lower case, or Mixed Case.
Initial Articles
- When used as the first word of a title, English language articles, "a", "an", and "the", are disregarded by The PAC. For example, "The New Yorker" is searched as "New Yorker."
- For all other languages, omit initial articles from your search EXCEPT for places and some other proper names. For example, for the Latin American country use "El Salvador" not just "Salvador"; for the French architect use "Le Corbusier".
Punctuation
- The PAC automatically converts the ampersand (&) to the spelled out word "and".
- Apostrophes are ignored. For example, O'Hara will be searched for as if it were spelled OHara.
- The PAC automatically replaces most other punctuation marks by spaces when doing a search. A title such as U.S. Social History will be searched for as if it were four words, U S Social History. If you omit the space between U and S, you will get a different search result.
Truncation
Use the asterisk "*" at the end of a search word or string of letters to find all words beginning with these same letters. For example, child* will retrieve child, childhood, children, child's, etc. Truncation within a word is not available.
Exact Matching
When searching by TITLE, results may be limited using the exact match symbol, the vertical bar "|" (usually located on the backslash \ key). For instance, input "time|" to retrieve only the entries for "time" and not "time management," etc. Likewise, input "cat|" to retrieve items about the animal and not items such as catalyst, catcher, or cathedral. Searches in the other PAC indexes automatically truncate and retrieve all matches which begin with the characters you input.
Limiting Your Search Results
To retrieve more exact results from your search, try the LIMIT feature. After executing a search, click on Limit/Sort (bottom of the screen) to bring up a search form with the available limiting options. You may limit your search results by material type such as periodical, music score, or videocassette; by year or range of years of publication; by language; by selected library locations; or, by Words in the Author, Title, or Subject. Be aware that limiting by language will retrieve both materials in the language you specify and materials translated from that language (and many of these are in English).
Click in the box for the category/categories you want to limit by. If the box includes an arrow, click on the arrow to see the possible choices, then highlight and click on your choice. You may enter any or all of the limit criteria. To execute the limit, click on the "Limit/sort" bar.
Boolean Searching
When doing a word search, words can be combined using logical connectors ("Boolean operators"). The available Boolean operators are:
- AND
- Use AND to request records that contain both words. Using AND has the effect of narrowing the search.
- OR
- Use OR to request records that contain either word. Using OR has the effect of expanding the search and tends to retrieve more records. For example, if "dogs or cats" is entered as a word search, the PAC would search for either "dogs" OR "cats" in the keyword indexed fields.
- NOT
- Use AND NOT before a word or before a phrase enclosed in parentheses to exclude the word or parenthetical expression in keyword indexed fields. The Boolean operator NOT (or NO) applies only to the word or parenthetical expression which immediately follows it.
- To exclude more than one word or parenthetical expression, either use parentheses or key NOT before each word to be excluded. For example, if "chess and not (checkers or backgammon)" is entered as a word search, the PAC would search for only those records that include "chess" but exclude "checkers" and "backgammon" in the keyword indexed fields. This example could also be entered as "chess and not checkers and not backgammon".
COMBINED Author/Title Search
Keywords from a title may be combined with the author's name in a search. This is particularly useful if you are not certain of the full title or if the author (for example, Mark Twain) has written a great many works.
AUTHOR portion
- Type the Name of the person, organization, or conference. For example:
| PERSON (last name first) | --> Twain, Mark OR Twain, M |
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| ORGANIZATION as author | --> California Legislature |
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| --> General Motors |
| CONFERENCE as author | --> Conference on Chemistry |
TITLE portion
- Type as many or as few of the words in the title as you want and in any word order. For example:
- The adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Tom Sawyer
- Sunset review report on the Bilingual Education Program
- bilingual education program report
- Reactivity of the photoexcited organic molecule; proceedings
- photoexcited molecule reactivity
This page http://infodome.sdsu.edu/howto/srchtips.shtml is maintained by Brian Moore.
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File saved 09/04/01 16:00 PDT
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