Contemporary Women's Issues Search interface combines the flexibility of Boolean search operators with the convenience of automatic stemming. CWI's search interface offers the ability to apply complex search logic to a query.
| Keywords
& Word Phrases Words in Title Book Author Article Author Date Subject Area Geo Region Source Article Type Publication Type |
AND OR NOT Parentheses Proximity Operators Near |
Stopwords |
Boolean Operators back to top
Use the Boolean AND, OR, NOT operators in
the Full text field.
AND Operator
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Use AND to require multiple terms to be found in an article.
For Example: Searching for rape and prostitution in the Full text field will retrieve only articles that include both terms.
OR Operator
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Use OR to find alternate terms in a search
statement.
For Example: Searching for rape or prostitution will retrieve articles which include at least one of the terms, but not necessarily both terms.
NOT Operator
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Use NOT to exclude words from a search
statement.
For Example: Searching for internet not sex will limit the search to articles that include the word internet but not those that include the word sex..
Using Parentheses
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Use PARENTHESES to group or override normal
term precedence.
For Example: Searching for cancer and (uterine or ovarian) will retrieve articles that include cancer and either uterine or ovarian.. (Without the parentheses the example above would have resulted in articles that include both cancer and uterine OR those that included ovarian.)
The table below summarizes Boolean functionality. back to top
| Operator | Action |
|---|---|
| AND | Finds only documents containing all of the specified words. earnings and equity finds documents with both the word earnings and the word equity.. |
| OR | Finds documents containing at least one of the specified words or phrases. earnings or equity finds documents with either the word earnings or the word equity. The found documents may contain more than one of the specified terms, but do not have to. |
| NOT | Excludes documents containing the specified word or phrase. The search equity not gender finds documents with equity but not containing gender. NOT may only be used to join two parts of a query together. Queries like NOT gender are not supported. |
| ( ) | Parentheses are used to group terms or to override normal term precedence. For example, equity and (pay or gender) finds documents that include the term equity and either pay OR gender. |
The NEAR Operator
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The NEAR operator searches for terms that occur within a specified number
of words of each other regardless of order. The second term may appear in the text
prior the first term. Stopwords can exist between the two
search terms.
For Example: women near business will retrieve articles in which the two words appear either prior or subsequent to each other but within one word of each other with the exception of stopwords. i.e. women in business, businesses for women etc.
For Example: dowry near5 bride will retrieve articles in which the terms biracial OR bi-racial appears either prior or subsequent to adoption by 3 words or less.
The table below summarizes Proximity functionality. back to top
| NEAR | Finds documents containing words in proximity to one another without respect to word order. For example, immigrant NEAR discrimination finds documents where immigrant and discrimination are next to one another in any order. immigrant NEAR10 discrimination finds documents where immigrant and discrimination are within 10 words of one another. |
Operator Precedence
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Boolean queries involving mixed operators are evaluated using standard Boolean precedence
rules. For example in a query containing both OR and AND
operators, all of the AND operators are evaluated before any of the OR
operators are evaluated. The table which follows lists the precedence of each of the
search operators. Operators with higher precedence are evaluated before operators with
lower precedence. If you mix operators with the same precedence, for example AND
and NOT, they are evaluated left-to-right. You may use parenthesis to
override this precedence and specify the order of evaluation. For example, in the query (child
OR girl) AND labor, the OR will be evaluated first.
| Highest | ( ) |
| NEAR (evaluated left to right) | |
| AND, NOT (evaluated left to right) | |
| Lowest | OR |
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