ABI INFORM: How to Search It

You can search All source types or choose to limit your search by a source type such as Scholarly Journals, Videos & Audio, Dissertations & Theses, Books and others that are available through the More menu. Additionally, you can limit your search to items containing Full text from ProQuest and Peer Reviewed items to only find documents reviewed by subject matter experts. If you are only searching a single database directly, you will not see not see the source type selections.

Enter your search terms in the search box to perform a simple search, or click on the 'Advanced Search' link to open the advanced search dialog boxes.  

• Capitalization does not matter. You can use upper or lower case or any combination. The database ignores capitalization.
• Regular Plurals and Possessives-- ABI/Inform automatically searches for regular plurals and possessives.  For example, searching computer will find computer, computers, and computer’s; security will find security, security’s, and securities.
• Use double quotation marks ("") around two or more words that you want to search as an exact phrase. Examples: “mutual fund”  “field of dreams” “activity based costing” "computer based modeling"
• Two words entered together will not be searched as if they were a phrase. For example, if you enter mutual fund without the double quotations, the search engine will retrieve documents that contain the words mutual and fund anywhere in any document.
• Truncation-- The asterisk * may be used at the end of a word to retrieve all endings on that word. Examples: dream* retrieves dream, dreams, dreamy, dreamland, etc. “mutual fund“ and return*  (return* will find returning, returned).
• The wildcard is the question mark (?).  To use the wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?.  ABI/Inform finds all citations of that word with the ? replaced by a letter. Example: ne?t will find neat, nest, or next.  It will not find net because the wildcard replaces a single character. Educat?? will find educator and educated, but will not find education.