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Search Terms

Description | Types of Search Terms | Stopwords | E-Numbers in Searches | Examples

Description
A search term is any term or phrase that is used, with the SEARCH command, to retrieve records that contain the term from an online database.

Types of Search Terms

Search terms:

  • are words, numbers, or alphanumerics
  • can be single words or phrases (depending on the search index they are in)
  • may incorporate wildcard characters
  • may be L-numbers
  • may be E-numbers

Stopwords

A stopword is a word that is not indexed because it occurs frequently or because it is judged to be unimportant to the database content. Because they are not indexed, stopwords are not searchable. Typical stopwords include: a, and, from, the, with.

Not all search indexes have stopwords. As a rule, they are used in the Basic Index of bibliographic and full-text databases.

For more information on the use of stopwords in a database, type HELP CONTENT while in the database.

E-Numbers in Searches

When E-numbers and E-number ranges are used as search terms they are associated using OR logic.

For example: => SEARCH E3-E5 E7
is equivalent to => SEARCH E3 OR E4 OR E5 OR E7.

Examples

Search terms must be appropriate for the search index and file being searched.

In the examples below, search terms are listed with a possible search index and type of database to emphasize that they are closely related.

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