IDSAS Search Hints and Tips

Many search options are available when searching for South Asian Studies scholars using the IDSAS 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};{nepal,bangladesh}

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

structural adjustment

democratic transition

bharatiya janata party

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

{social history},{sri lanka}

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

indian;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

urdu;poetry

is faster and more precise than a search for

urdu