UWRT 150 Writing Seminar (Nassereddine): Search Techniques

Phrase searching - allows you to search for documents containing a specific phrase rather than keywords in a randomized order.

Summon 2.0™ allows you to search for phrases using “ ” (quotes).

Searches can be performed using the wildcards “?” (question mark) and “*” (asterisk). Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.

The question mark (?) will match any one character.

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word.

Can be used to find “Smith” or “Smyth” by searching for “Sm?th”.

A search for “Ch*ter” would match “Charter”, “Character”, and “Chapter”. When used at the end of a word, such as “Tech*”, it will match all suffixes “technology”, “technological”,  and “technically”.

“microcircuits OR nanocircuits” will return items that contain either term.

This can be combined with quoted terms such as “teacher education” OR “educator training”.

Proximity — retrieves terms within a specified distance of one another.

To use the proximity search, enclose your search terms in quotes and use the tilde (~) followed by a number.  The number indicates the maximum number of words you wish to allow between your search terms.

"employee engagement"~5

finds material where "employee" and "engagement" appear within 5 words of each other.

NOTE: proximity searching does not take the order of search terms into account. A search on "employee engagement strategies"~5 will yield results in which the three search terms appear in various orders.