Keyword Searching 1

Keywords are any significant terms you choose to search by. They should be distinctive terms identifying the subject and should not include articles, pronouns, prepositions and the like. Within the basic search mode there are two ways of searching keywords: Boolean and relevance.

The former, named for logician George Boole, uses the words "and," "or" and "not" to combine terms; the latter, like an Internet search engine, uses "+" to designate essential terms in the search, and groups results according to the degree of matching with the keywords.

Both Boolean and relevance searching use the truncation symbol "?" to produce entries beginning with a particular string. "Synthes?" recovers the terms synthesis, synthesize, synthese, but not synthetic. Both modes of keyword searching use quotation marks to enclose phrases, e.g. "United States." The following are equivalent search statments using the two modes:

Boolean: frontier? and pioneer? and "united states"

Relevance: +frontier? +pioneer? +"united states"