| Truncation | Asterisk: * |
child* retrieves records with "child", "children", "childbirth", "childbearing", "childish", and so forth. |
| Wildcard (Single character) |
Question mark: ? |
m?nchen retrieves records with "München" or "Munchen". |
| Phrases |
Quation marks: "word1 word2" Default: AND operators between words |
"north pole" retrieves only records in which the words "north" and "pole" appear next to each other, in that exact order. north pole--without quotation marks--retrieves articles with both words "north" and "pole", regardless of where the appear in the document. |
| Boolean operators |
AND, OR, NOT. |
lincoln AND douglas retrieves articles that contain both "lincoln" and "douglas". lincoln OR douglas retrieves articles that contain either "lincoln" or "douglas". |
| Proximity operators |
"word1 word2"~n |
"henry thoreau"~2 retrieves "henry thoreau", "henry david thoreau", but not "thoreau, henry david". |
| Stemming |
Pound sign: # |
Goose# retrieves records with "goose", "geese", or "gosling". |
| Fuzzy Searching | Tilde ~ |
dostoyevsky~ retrieves articles with "dostoyevsky", as well as variants like "dostoevsky", "dostoievski", "dostoevsky", "dostoyevski", "dostoevskii", "dostoevski", and so forht. |
| Boosting term relevance |
Caret followed by a number: ^n |
cat^7 dog gives seven times more weight to the term "cat" than it does "dog". |
| Article Title |
ti: |
ti:"lord halifax and monasticism" words or phrases in the article's title. |
| Title of a Reviewed Work | rt: | rt:"exterminate all the brutes" words or phrases in the title of a book being reviewed. |
| Author's Name |
au: |
au:"cannadine" words or phrases in the name of the article's author. |
| Reviewed Author | ra: | ra:"asa briggs" words or phrases in the anme of an author whose book is being reviewed. |