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General Searching

This help screen offers explanations for:

The default option, available when you click "Search" from the general opening screen, is the Simple Search. Type a word or continuous phrase in the search box, and select the field you want to search (options are: Any Field, Author, Title, Journal and Subject.) A continuous phrase is a sequence of words in a particular order. If you want to search for two or more words without specifying any particular order, select Advanced Search from the navigation bar, and enter the terms in separate search boxes ). You will have to use the wildcard character (an asterisk *) at the end of the word or phrase to search for variations or the plural of a word: if not, a following space is assumed. Thus, "japanese politics" in "Title" will search for the phrase japanese politics (in that order); "japanese politic" will search for the (non-existing) exact phrase japanese politic, but "japanese politic*" will retrieve such phrases as japanese politics, japanese political, etc. Phrase searches do not work in the subject field; use the advanced search mode instead.

In the Advanced Search mode, available from the navigation bar, you can specify up to three terms or continuous phrases per search, and you can use the provided Boolean operators to specify how the terms or phrases are to be linked. (Boolean operators available here are and, or and not. Use or to expand the search to encompass variables, such as "Cambodia" or "Kampuchea". Use and or not to narrow the search, as in "calligraphy" and "chin*", or as in "Urdu" [in Title] not "Pakistan" [in Subject].)

For subject searches, build up your search in the advanced search mode, using single words combined by the Boolean operator and: a phrase search for "Indonesia -- Anthropology & Sociology -- Study & Teaching" will not work; use "Indonesia" [in Subject] and "Anthropology" [in Subject] and "Study" [in Subject] instead.

In order to retrieve only those publications that contain one of the four special (or "floating") subject headings— "Bibliography", "Reference", "Sources", and "Study & Teaching"—that can be a subset on each subject level, please enter the appropriate "floating" subject in the advanced search box. You cannot use the country-subject browse to retrieve such publications.

You can search for particular authors by entering the author's name as a continuous phrase and selecting the Author field. Both "paul pelliot" in Author and "pelliot, paul" in Author will work.

Do not use any diacritics in your search. (See the help pages on Searching Using Regular and ALA Display Modes and Display and Fonts for more information, including how to use the ALA Display and Regular Display buttons.)

You can further limit the results of your search by specifying a date or range of dates. The default values displayed in the date boxes in the search screen reflect the maximum date range available. The form will not allow you to replace these with dates outside of this range. You may, however, replace these with dates reflecting a smaller range of years.

In addition, you can limit your research to document type: journal articles, books (note: only for 1971-1991; monographs published after 1991 are not included in the BAS), and analytics (individually authored articles from collective publications.)

You can revise your search by clicking on "revise search" link in the navigation bar, which brings you to the advanced search screen with your previous search already filled in.

You can resubmit and review past searches quickly by clicking on the "history" link in the navigation bar, and then by clicking the relevant hyperlink in the "Search Query" column.

By default, records are sorted by author, last name first. If there is no author, the results are sorted alphabetically by title. For results sets up to 1000 records, you may change the sort to a chronological or reverse chronological sort by using the pull down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your results screen. (This feature will not work with results sets larger than 1000 records. If you have more than 1000 records in your result section, you will see a message that says "threshold exceeded" in place of the sort menu.)

Notes:

  • The wildcard asterisk * only works at the end of words and phrases. It does not work internally: "japan*se" will retrieve nothing, "japan* political" behaves just like the search "japan political".

  • Searching for phrases ignores intervening punctuation: "japan political" will retrieve phrases such as ... Japan: political...

  • The distinction between upper-case and lower-case is ignored in all text searching

  • You can browse entries classified in the same category as any result by simply clicking the Subjects: hyperlink

  • In addition to searching for items that contain the information you have specified, you can browse entries by particular region/country and subject, or by journal title. Such browses present lists sorted by a principle appropriate to that particular browse.

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