IDMES Search Hints and Tips

Many search options are available when searching for Middle East Studies scholars using the IDMES 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;islam

Use curly brackets to combine boolean expressions, for example:

{women,health};{syria,turkey}

Queries consisting of two or more words without intervening punctuation may be used for phrase searching:

human rights

petroleum exporting countries

palestinian authority

Word phrases can also be combined using curly brackets, for example:

{social history},{united arab emirates}

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

saudi;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

persian;poetry

is faster and more precise than a search for

persian