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Congressional Documents: Search TipsFielded Searches | Catalog of Available Documents | Identification Codes | Sample Searches Fielded SearchesFielded searches allow you to make your search more specific by limiting your results by pre-selected elements, such as Congress and type of document. The fields for the Congressional Documents databases are as follows: Congress: 104th, 105th, 106th and 107th Type of document: Senate documents, House documents, and treaty documents To select or deselect a field, click on the appropriate box or boxes. You may search one or multiple types of documents and Congresses with a single query. Queries that do not specify a field will perform a search of all of the document types.
Sample Searches (3)The following sample searches are provided as guides to popular types of searches in the Congressional Documents databases. They are performed in the Congressional Documents database for the 105th Congress. For the sake of space, only the top three hits in each results list are included with each example below. Subject | Document Number | Treaty Document and Corresponding Executive Report 1. Search by SubjectThis type of search returns documents that are related to a specific subject. The word(s) that you enter as your search term(s) may appear anywhere within the document.
2. Search by Document NumberThis type of search returns documents based on document number. If a field for document type is not specified, the search will return relevant Senate, House, and treaty documents, as in the example below.
3. Search for Treaty Document and Corresponding Executive ReportThis type of search allows you to retrieve a treaty document and its corresponding executive report. It requires you to perform the same search in both the Congressional Documents and the Congressional Reports databases. To narrow the search results, check the boxes for treaty documents in Congressional Documents and executive reports in Congressional Reports.
A treaty document presents a treaty as submitted to the Senate for ratification by the president of the United States. The corresponding executive report from the Committee on Foreign Relations provides the committee's recommendations on the treaty. Catalog of Available DocumentsTo view a current catalog of Congressional documents available via GPO Access, click on the "submit" button on the search page without having entered any query terms and then select the appropriate document from the results list. Identification CodesIn the list that displays your query results, the title of each Congressional Documents document is preceded by an identification code. The identification code contains two elements: a database abbreviation and the document number. For example, in the listing "S.Doc.106-2 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT," "S.Doc." stands for Senate documents, "106-2" is the document number, and "IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT" is the title of the document. Variations on the database abbreviation are "H.Doc." for House documents and "T.Doc." for treaty documents. The document number contains the number of the Congress during which the document was published (e.g., "S.Doc.106-2" was published by the 106th Congress). |