For additional help, click on the HELP button on the search screen in the SocINDEX database.
Basic Search
- In the first box, type the word or phrase you wish to find. (See screen shot below.)
- You may combine terms using the Boolean (logical) operators: and, or, not
Example: "gender differences" and educat*
- You can use the truncation symbol, the asterisk *, to find plurals and all variations of a word. Example: educat* will find educate, educated, education, educationally, etc.
- The wildcard symbol, the question mark ?, should be used within words. To use the wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?. SocINDEX 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.
- Searches are NOT case sensitive. You can type your term(s) in upper case, lower case, or a combination of the two.
- Use double quotation marks to indicate phrase searching, that is, the words in the quotes must occur close to each other in the database record in order for the record to be retrieved.
The number of results you retrieved will appear on the left-hand side of the result list.
The results of your search will appear in a list ranked by relevance, but you can change how the results are listed by clicking on the down arrow next to Relevance and changing the way results are listed.
