IDASS Search Hints and Tips
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Many search options are available when searching for African Studies scholars using the IDASS search engine.
Boolean Expressions
(combining multiple keywords)
Use commas in your search query to represent boolean OR. Do not include a space after each comma. To find
all documents that contain at least one occurrence of "media", or "journalism", or "communications":
- media,journalism,communications
Use semicolons to represent boolean AND:
- art;religion
Use curly brackets to combine boolean expressions, for example:
- {women,health};{tanzania,zimbabwe}
Queries consisting of two or more words without intervening punctuation may be used for phrase searching:
- structural adjustment
- democratic transition
- african national congress
Word phrases can also be combined using curly brackets, for example:
- {social history},{burkina faso}
Important note: phrase searching will not find a phrase that is broken onto two lines in the source document. If your phrase
search doesn't find the desired document, try using boolean expressions (semicolon, representing AND) instead. But this could also give you
unrelated documents that contain the target words in another context:
- political;parties
- water;resources
- nigerian;history
Faster Searches
A search for common words takes longer than a search for uncommon words.
You can speed up your search, and reduce the number of unrelated documents returned, by combining your terms using the boolean
AND. A search for
- african;languages
is faster and more precise than a search for
- languages
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