1. Use at least two or three search terms. By using more search terms to narrow your search, you can locate essays that fit your information needs better. The following sample results are hypothetical:

Note: By default, the search engine finds only those essays containing all of the words you specify. See Search Operators below to learn how to use the AND, OR, NOT, and proximity operators.

Use of Stopwords  Back to Top

3. Be specific. If you’re looking for information about ancient Rome, enter both of those words in your search. If you enter just Rome, your search may give you essays that discuss modern Rome or Rome, N.Y., in addition to ancient Rome.

4. Use plural or other word endings. For example, if you are looking for discussions of murder, search for various forms of the word using the OR operator as the connector, e.g. murder or murders or murderer or murderous. (Note: You may also enter multiple words without the OR operator.) It is also possible, depending on the desired search term, to use the truncation (or wildcard) feature to retrieve both singular and plural forms of a word, e.g. murder*.

5. Try using synonyms for your original words. For example, enter "nervous breakdown" or "mental breakdown" or "nervous disorder" or "mental instability".

6. Check your spelling. If you type litrature instead of literature, your search won’t find any matches.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The * and ? may not be used in date fields (such as Birth or Death year). Instead, use Date Range searching.

The * (standing for any number of characters) is placed at the end of the term’s root. The search retrieves all words sharing the same root. For example, the term faith* retrieves essays that contain the words faith, faithful, or faiths.

The ? is used to replace exactly one character within a word to retrieve various forms of that word. For example, the term wom?n retrieves essays that contain either woman or women; and psych????y matches either psychology or psychiatry but not psychotherapy.

Date Ranges Back to Top
A date range is used to search for multiple years in date fields (such as Birth or Death Year fields).

• 1940 - 1949 (to search for any year in the 1940s)
• 1927 - 1932 (to search for any year from 1927 through 1932)

Search Operators  Back to Top
The Boolean search operators AND, OR, NOT, and proximity operators may be used to refine your search. Whether the operators are typed in uppercase or lowercase does not affect the search. Please note, however, that if an operator appears in a title you are searching for, such as The Road Not Taken, it will still be interpreted as a search operator. This may lead to irrelevant results. If you are searching for a title that contains a search operator, enclose the title in quotation marks.

PARENTHESES. The operators described above each operate on either simple terms (words or phrases) or a more complex query delimited by parentheses ( ). Parentheses allow you to construct very powerful queries. For example:

• "pulp fiction" AND ((detective AND crime) OR hard-boiled)
• ("cowboy*" OR ("gold rush" AND california)) AND (1849 OR nineteenth century)

Boolean operators are applied in the order in which they appear. Therefore, the following searches are equivalent:

• apples AND bananas OR oranges
• 
  (apples AND bananas) OR oranges

Field Length Back to Top
The length of any given field is not limited to the window you see on the screen. As a search term or terms is keyed, the text will continue to scroll to the left, so that you can see the search expression as it is being keyed.