Advanced Searching Tools

Boolean Operators use key words to get individual search terms to interact with each other in unique ways. Boolean Operators: 

• MUST in caps.
• Can use parenthesis to search for one boolean before the other: Touch AND (screen NOT hands).

Field searches, or fielded searches, specify which field to search. The basic Summon searching includes titles, authors, subject terms, abstracts and other metadata fields as well as full text. Field searching limits results to matches only in the specified field.

The format of field searching is field:(search terms). A list of common searchable fields in Summon can be found here.

Examples:

• Title:(biotechnology)
• Title:(experimental psychology)
• Author:(graham greene)
• SubjectTerms:(medical care)

The first example actually works without the parentheses, but the second example requires them; otherwise, the field specifier "Title:" will only modify "experimental", and not "psychology". To avoid an oversight, we recommend using parentheses with single terms as well.

Field searching can be used with a phrase search. For example:

• Title:"machine translation"

The above search specifies the phrase search in the Title field, and it will only match the exact phrase "machine translation" and not "machine and human translation", for example.

Please note that the ":" character can mean any of the following:

• The field search operator
• A punctuation symbol - often used to combine a title and a subtitle
• A letter in an alphabet or a transliteration system in certain languages

Summon does intelligent processing to the search string to disambiguate these, and it should not be necessary to do anything to disambiguate these in most cases. If it is used as a punctuation, it will be ignored, for example. However, Summon provides two methods for manually escaping the ":" operator. When these methods are used, ":" will NOT be interpreted as the field search operator.

• Enclosing them in double quotes (i.e., phrase searches) – Examples: "abc:d", "title: subtitle"
• Using the escape character "\" – Examples: abc\:d, title\: subtitle

A wildcard is a single character that can represent one or a number of characters or an empty string of unknown characters. ... The percent symbol (%) represents any character or characters that could be found in its place or after it.

For example, searching the name for Ste%e will return Stephen, Steve, Steven, Stevenson.

Proximity searching allows you to search for keywords that are within a certain distance from one another, measured in number of words. An example of how to write one is as follows:

"earthquake fault"~10

This has the search look for results in which the words "earthquake" and "fault" are 10 words apart from one another.

You may also use Near or Within operators.

Near Operator (N): N5 finds the words if they are within five words of one another, regardless of the order in which they appear. For example, type tax N5 reform to find results that would match tax reform as well as reform of income tax.

Within Operator (W): W8 finds the words if they are within eight words of one another, in the order in which you entered them. For example, type tax W8 reform to find results that would match tax reform but would not match reform of income tax.

Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase.

Unless you specify otherwise, most databases will assume the Boolean AND connector, which means that all words must be present for a particular record to be listed in the search results, but not necessarily as an exact phrase. In other words climate change should get the same results as climate and change.

Use Quotation Marks in order to do this.

• "Climate Change"
• "World Hunger"
• "Video Games"