Keyword Search: Help

When you search by keyword, each database record is checked for the presence of the word or words you specify. A record will be retrieved if the words appear in almost any part (or "field") of the record, including the title, subtitle, author, publishing information, and subject fields. In contrast, when you search by subject, a record will only be retrieved if your search words appear in the subject fields of that record.

Keyword searches are useful when you do not know the authorized subject heading for your subject, or when you have incomplete or complex information about a title or author.

Keyword searches can retrieve large result sets. Several tools are available to help you refine your search and retrieve more meaningful results, including Boolean searching, Search Limits, truncation, nesting, and keyword searching by command, e.g., NKEY ruskin and TKEY stones and KPPD 1851.

Search Strategies:

• Use wildcards for truncation:
• ? matches zero or more characters, e.g.
• ?rport will search for airport, carport, etc.
• behavi?r will search for behavior and behaviour
• ecol? will search for ecology, ecological, etc.
• % matches specified character length (a % equals one character)
  • defen%e will search for defence and defense
• Enclose exact search phrases in quotation marks: e.g., "middle ages". Truncation may be included within quoted phrases: e.g., "british theat?" will search for British theater and also British theatre.
• Omit intervening commas, periods, apostrophes and most other punctuation. Retain hyphens and internal commas or periods (commas or periods within numbers), but those terms must be bounded by quotation marks.
• "1,001 broadways" or "1.001 poemas"
• "al-jazeera"
• Include any elided articles:
• lenfant will retrieve l'enfant
• enfant will not retrieve l'enfant
• enfant will retrieve mon enfant
• You can do a Keyword search in an Orbis Simple Search without typing the boolean operator, AND. A script will automatically insert it between your search terms. OR and NOT must be typed as part of your search statement.
• freud dreams is the same as freud AND dreams
• freud (dreams OR fantasies) is the same as freud AND (dreams OR fantasies)
• Those who prefer to manually construct Keyword searches with boolean operators can still do so. Combine several terms using Boolean operators: and, or, or not. (See table below.)
• Use nesting (parentheses) to further refine a Boolean search: e.g., to find materials on Mayan pyramids or temples, enter (temple? or pyramid?) and maya?
• You can combine several Boolean operators in a single search statement, using parentheses to group concepts together and quotation marks to indicate phrases.  For example, to find oral history materials on the Anishinabe people, who are sometimes called Ojibwe, Ojibwa or Chippewa, or spelled Anishinaabe or Anishinabeg, try:

                           (Chippewa or Ojibw? or Anishina?) and "oral history"

Concept	Search Examples	Retrieval Formula
and	sustainable and agriculture Venezuela and "free trade" vikings and russia "gaia hypothesis" and "global warming"	Retrieves only records containing both terms.
or	jazz or bebop  60 or sixty  "color theory" or "colour theory"	Retrieves records containing either one or more terms.
not	burma not myanmar  "civil war" not american architecture not landscape	Excludes records containing the second term.
nesting	(temple? or pyramid?) and maya? acid and (rain or precipitation)	Use parentheses ( ) to group segments of Boolean queries for more complex searches.

Keyword Searching by Command

Keyword indexes let you search specific parts of an item’s record.  They are available for use in Simple and Advanced Keyword searches; those described below are the most useful for typical catalog searching. These indexes are specified by four letter codes in the Keyword search option (e.g. NKEY).  They are selected by index name (e.g. Author) in the Advanced Search drop-down menu. The table below lists Yale-specific Search Index Codes (shown in ALL CAPS) and their corresponding Search Names. These codes may be entered in ALL CAPS or in lower case letters. Keyword Anywhere (GKEY) is a general keyword index which indexes every part of in a record; GKEY is the default if a more specific search code is not specified.

Index types: Authors - Subjects - Titles - Notes - Publication Information - Numbers