PRISMA Help

Help: Boolean, proximity and truncation searching

To narrow the scope of your search you can use the following special sets of predefined words, called operators, to join together your search terms:

Boolean operators
Proximity operators
Wildcard characters

Boolean operators

You combine your search terms using the following special words, called Boolean operators:

AND

The AND operator retrieves all records that contain the search terms it separates. However, this type of search normally retrieves fewer results than if you searched for one of the terms on its own.

If you have entered search terms in more than one search box, PRISMA treats them as if they were combined using the AND operator.

Note that if you want to search for the word 'and' in a phrase, such as 'Santiago and Chile', you should type the phrase into the search box and enclose it in double quotes; for example, "Santiago and Chile".

OR

The OR operator retrieves all records that contain either or both of the search terms it separates. This type of search retrieves more results than if you searched for one of the terms on its own.

If you select more than one search term from a list, PRISMA automatically combines them in the search box using this operator.

Note that if you want to search for the word 'or' in a phrase, such as 'Santiago or Chile', you should type the phrase into the search box and enclose it in double quotes; for example, "Santiago or Chile".

NOT

The NOT operator retrieves all works that contain the first search term but not the second.

Note that if you want to search for the word 'not' in a phrase, such as 'Santiago not Chile', you should type the phrase into the search box and enclose it in double quotes; for example, "Santiago not Chile".

Proximity operators

PRISMA allows you to use proximity operators to look for words that are close to each other:

NEAR
FBY (Followed BY)

To use proximity operators:

Enter your first search term.
Enter a proximity operator.
Enter a full stop followed by the required number of words you want to allow between search terms; for example, near.6.

If no maximum is set, PRISMA will list all items that contain the selected search terms within ten words of each other.

If you are performing a phrase proximity search, PRISMA counts the number of words between the first word of the first phrase and the first word of the second phrase.

NEAR operator

Allows you to search for terms that have a specified distance between each other, and are in any order. For example:

educación near bilingüe

quecha near.6 Peru

FBY operator

Allows you to search for terms that have a specified distance between each other, and are in a specified order. For example:

control fby natalidad

migración fby.4 México

Wildcard characters

PRISMA allows you to list documents containing variations on a search term by using the * (asterisk) or ? (question mark) wildcard characters.

The * character can represent one or more characters in a search term. The ? character represents a single character in a search term.

To perform a wildcard search:

Enter the first few letters (or stem) of your search term followed by one of the wildcard operators.

Note that you can only use the ? wildcard in the middle of a word.

If you are performing a phrase search, you can only use wildcard operators in the final word in the phrase.

Examples

econom*

Will retrieve entries for all records containing the words: economía, económico/a(s), economista(s), economics, economic, economy, economist etc.

Me?ico

Will retrieve matches for all records containing the words México, Méjico or Mexico.