RDS Business Reference Suite Boolean Operators

About RDS Business Reference Suite
Words & Phrases	Boolean Operators	Proximity Operators
Words in Title	AND	NEAR
Date	OR	Parentheses
Company	NOT	Operator Precedence
Concept Terms		Summary of Operator Functions
Marketing Terms
Industry Name
SIC/Product Codes		Command Prefixes
Document Types		How to Command Search
Geographic Names
Sources		Word Truncation
Multi-Selecting		Stopword List

Boolean Operators Proximity Operators and Operator Precedence

Use the Boolean AND, OR, NOT operators in the Words and Phrases, Title, and Company fields.

AND Operator - back to top
Use AND to require multiple terms to be found in an article.

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For Example: Searching for ginko and ginseng in the Words and Phrases field will retrieve only articles that include both terms.

OR Operator - back to top
Use OR to find alternate terms in a search statement.

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For Example: Searching for ginko or ginseng will retrieve articles which include at least one of the terms, but not necessarily both terms.

NOT Operator - back to top

Use NOT to exclude words from a search statement.

For Example: Searching for java not coffee will limit the search to articles that include the word java but not those that include the word coffee.

Proximity Operators

Using Parentheses - back to top
Use PARENTHESES to group or override normal term precedence.

For Example: Searching for ginseng and (herbal or homeopathic) will retrieve articles that include ginseng and either herbal or homeopathic. (With out the parentheses the example above would have resulted in articles that include both ginseng and herbal OR those that included homeopathic.)

Using the NEAR Operator - back to top
The NEAR operator searches terms that occur within a specified number of words of each other regardless of order. The second term may appear in the text prior to the first term. Stop words can exist between the two search terms.

For example, home near banking will retrieve articles in which the terms home appears either prior to or after the word banking.

Operator Precedence - back to top
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 (General Motors OR Ford) AND automobile, the OR will be evaluated first.

HIGHEST	CT= (any specified two character prefix term equals)
	( ) Parentheses
	NEAR Proximity
	NOT
	AND
LOWEST	OR

The table below summarizes the Boolean functionality - back to top

OPERATOR	ACTION
and	Finds only documents containing all of the specified words. The search price AND copper finds documents with both the word price and the word copper.
or	Finds only documents containing at least one of the specified words or phrases. The search price OR cooper finds documents with either the word price or the word copper. The found documents may contain more than one of the specified terms, but do not have to have both.
not	Excludes documents containing the specified word or phrase. The search copper NOT steel finds documents with copper but not those that also contain the word steel. NOT cannot be used as a unary operator, that is queries that are entered as NOT steel are not supported.
( )	Parentheses are used to group terms or to override normal term precedence. For example, price and (copper or steel) finds articles that include the term price and either copper or steel.