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AgEconSearch - Tips for searching more effectively

Truncation

1. Use an asterisk (*) after a word stem to get all records that include words starting with that root. For example:

select*   will retrieve selects, selector, selectman, selecting

2. The search engine automatically supports stemming, which expands your search to include the common plurals and past tenses of the words. For example, searching for dispute would also retrieve disputes and disputed.

Limiting to a particular group

You can restrict your search to a group by clicking on the arrow to the right of the top box. If you want your search to encompass all of AgEcon Search, leave that box in the default position.

Searching “Anywhere in Record”

“Anywhere in Record” will search in the following fields:

Title

Author

Abstract

Keywords

JEL code

Year

Phrase Searching

To search using multiple words as a phrase, put quotation marks (") around the phrase.

"organizational change"

Combining terms with Boolean search operators – AND  OR  NOT

The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT can be used to combine terms.

They may be selected from the dropdown menu or typed into the search boxes. Note that if they are typed in the boxes, they must be CAPITALIZED.

Boolean search operators, continued

AND - to limit searches to find items containing all words or phrases, e.g.

 cats AND dogs  will retrieve all items that contain BOTH the words "cats" and "dogs".

OR - to enlarge searches to find items containing any of the words or phrases

cats OR dogs  will retrieve all items that contain EITHER the words "cats" or "dogs".

NOT - to exclude items containing the word following this operator, e.g.

training NOT cat  will retrieve all items that contain the word "training" EXCEPT those also containing the word "cat".

Putting a minus (-) sign before a word is the same as using NOT. For instance,

training -cat   or   training NOT cat

will get items with the word "training", but not those that also contain the word "cat".

Parentheses can be used in the search query to group search terms into sets, and operators can then be applied to the whole set, e.g.

(cats OR dogs) AND (training OR discipline)

Additional info:

AgEcon Search uses the Jakarta Lucene search engine.

Stop Words are:

"a", "and" , "are" , "as" , "at" , "be" , "but" , "by" , "for" , "if" , "in" , "into",

"is" ,"it" ,"no" , "not" , "of" , "on" , "or" , "such", "the" , "to" , "was"

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