• Search Syntax
• Search field names and descriptions:

  Document Level Fields: creator - Document Creator date - Volume Date title - Document Title description - Document Description state - State of Publication (U.S. only) country - Country of Publication text - Full text. This is the default field.

  Examples: creator:"Story, Joseph" date:"1808" title:"Marbury v Madison" description:"tributes" state:"Alaska" Country:"Canada" text:"Naval Court Martial" To ensure proper phrase searching, put search terms in quotation marks.

Common Search Syntax

1. Boolean operators must be ALL CAPITAL letters:
   AND, OR, NOT
   
   
2. Root expander/wildcard searching: use * or ?
   Heate* - will find heater, heated, heaters
   Lab*r - will find labor, labour
   Te?t - will find test, text, tent
   
   
3. Proximity searching: use the tilde ~ symbol
   "offshore drilling environment pollution"~25 - will find those four terms within 25 words of each other
   
   Note: The current syntax does not allow for a wildcard/root expander within a proximity search.
   
   
4. Boosting terms: use the caret symbol ^ to place more importance on a term
   healthcare AND "individual mandate" AND medicare^5 - results that contain medicare more frequently will be brought to the top of the search results list

For more details, download/view our Advanced Search Syntax Guide