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SearchALL: a One Stop Search: Search Tips

How to use SearchALL. A one-stop search, providing instant access to the breadth of the library's collections.

Guide Index

This guide is designed to help you search Search ALL.

Advanced Search

Use Advanced Search to:

  • Search across many fields including: keyword, title, author, journal name, call number, note, etc... 
     
  • Limit your seach by date, content type, full text availability, peer reviewed, etc...

  • Exclude newspaper articles, book reviews and dissertations from your search.

  • Expand your search to items from outside the library's collections.

Proximity to Other Words

Use the tilde (~)character at the end of a multiple words.

When used on the term“yeast bread”~6, the term yeast and the term bread must be found within 6 words of each others in the document.

Search a Range of Date

Use the curled braquets { } characters to search a range of date. 

{2010-2012} this will retrieve records containing the years 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Search Tips

Boolean Search 
Use Boolean Operators to connect words or concepts within a text field. 
SearchALL offers the following Boolean operations: AND, OR, and NOT
The operators must be written in ALL CAPS
                                                                                   

                    AND 
     used to combine two words  
              or concepts  
            e.g. Lebanon AND Business

                             OR 
    used to obtain results containing any  
          of the mentioned keywords
             e.g. Middle East OR Lebanon

                     NOT 
        used to exclude a word 
 or a concept e.g. Lebanon NOT War

 
Phrase Search

Use quotation marks "  " to get results with the excact phrase e.g. "fast food" 

 

 
Wildcard Use
Use wildcard symbols (?) and (*) in place of a letter/s within a keyword if you are not sure of the spelling or if there are different forms of the root word. 
The question mark (?) will match any one character and can be used to find “women” or “woman” by searching for “wom?n”

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word.

  • A search for “Ch*ter” would match “Charter”, “Character”, and “Chapter”.
  • When used at the end of a word, such as “dream*”, it will match all suffixes “dreaming”, “dreamer”, etc...                  
  N.B. Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.

 
Field Specific Search

Use the single search box in Basic Search or the keyword search box in Advanced Search to search across many fields automatically.

        In Basic Search you can explicitly search a field using the syntax: 
                                              field:(query) 

For example:

The search Title:(Arab Spring) will retrieve records that contain these words in the title. To find records with an excat title use quotation marks  (" ")
e.g. Title:("Leadership development in the Middle East")

The search ISBN:(9780195309911), finds records that contain that value in the ISBN field.
  
   


Searchable fields are:

  • Title
  • SubjectTerms
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • PublicationTitle
  • Volume
  • Issue
  • Language
  • Notes
  • ISBN
  • ISSN
  • DOI
  • DEWEY (Call Number)