Table . Northern Light Quick Reference
For this type of search:
| Do this:
| Examples:
|
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Plain-English Question
| Simply type a phrase or question that expresses the idea or concept, using as many words as necessary.
| Where can I find information about study abroad programs in France?
|
Phrase Search
| Type phrase surrounded by double quotes.
| "youth hostel"
|
AND Search (multiple words and phrases, each of which must be present)
| Type words (or phrases in quotes) separated by a space. You can also use plus signs (+) or AND operator if you're accustomed to doing so. All three examples would produce the same results.
|
Princeton "financial aid"
+Princeton +"financial aid"
Princeton AND "financial aid"
|
OR Search (multiple words and phrases, any one of which may be present)
| Type words or phrases separated by OR (in uppercase or lowercase).
|
scholarship OR
"student loan" OR grant
|
NOT Search (to exclude a word or phrase)
| Use a minus sign (-) directly in front of the word or phrase you want to exclude. Alternatively, you can use NOT (uppercase or lowercase).
|
booksellers –Amazon.com
booksellers NOT Amazon.com
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Case-Sensitive Search
| Strictly speaking, not available. Northern Light returns the same set of results regardless of case. But if you use mixed case, hits that make an exact case match will appear higher on the results list.
| "Scholastic Aptitude Test"
|
Date Search
| Not available with Simple Search form. Use Power Search or Business Search.
| |
Field Search
| Type field-search term followed by a colon and the search word or phrase.
| |
| For Web pages and Special Collection documents: | |
| title: (to look for words in Web page or document titles)
| title:"Favorite Poem Project"
|
| url: (to look for words in Web page URLs)
| url:booktv
|
| link: (to find Web pages or documents that include links to a specific site)
| link:abouttheauthor.com
|
| text: (used with another field-search term to look for words in the text of Web pages or documents)
| url:npr.org
text:"Car Talk"
|
| For Special Collection documents only:
| |
| company: (to find documents by company name)
| company:ebay
|
| ticker: (to find documents by ticker symbol)
| ticker:MSO
|
| pub: (to find documents in specific publication)
| pub:business week
|
| recid: (to find document based on ID number from Northern Light article summary page)
| recid:AA20010207020001236
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| Note: For fill-in-the-blanks field searching, use Power, Business, or Investext search forms.
| |
Nested Search
| Use parentheses to group Boolean expressions into more complex queries.
| SAT AND ("sample test" OR "prep course")
|
Proximity Search
| Not available.
| |
Wildcard Search
| Use an asterisk (*) to search for multiple characters at the end of (or within) a word, or a percent sign (%) to look for a single character. Wildcard must be preceded by at least four other characters.
|
GRE test prep*
gene%logy
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