Advanced Search Help
Advance Search Fields
Use the fields on the advance search screen to create a more detailed search.
Show Results that have
The fields in this section assist in combining your search terms in specific ways:
- All of the words
- The phrase
- Any of the words
- None of the words
These fields search across the whole record.
Limit search to
The fields in this section search specific aspects of the records.
- Title - searches only the title field of pages, and documents. This is useful if you are looking for a particular article.
- Author - searches only the author fields of the records. On ARCHI authors are usually an organisation rather than an individual, e.g. South Eastern Sydney Illawarra Area health Service or Blacktown Hospital.
- Subject - searches only the subject field of the records. This field uses controlled vocabulary from the NSW Health thesaurus.
- Format - use this list to limit your search to a web page (HTML) or a document, e.g. pdf.
- Modified dates - use these fields to limit to a date range, before a given date, or after. Use both of them to set a range. e.g. after 1 Jan 2009 and before 30 Jun 2009.
- Within - use this list to select parts of the site to search.
- Sort results by - this selection will change the way the result list is displayed. The default display is relevance - that is the results where your search terms appear the most are higher on the list. For instance if you are using the title search to look for a particular page, you may like to select "title" to display your results alphabetically.
Use more than one field to combine search criteria.
Query Operators
Below is a list of symbols and terms used to help refine or expand searches. You can also use the query operators in the simple search field.
| Symbol | Description |
|---|---|
| " " |
Phrase will search for those words as they appear in the order given e.g. "Nurse practitioner" |
| * | Truncation operator matches words the string of characters within words. For example anti* matches all words starting with anti, such as antium and antioch. Be careful, there are almost always more matching words than you expect. The truncation operator can appear at the left, at the right or both, but NOT in the middle of the string, e.g. *och* matches all words containing the string och, such as antioch and rochester. |
| # |
Stemming will search for the root of a word and it’s variations. It is different to truncation in that it will look for variations in the word, not the exact string. For example, the query "economic# policy#" will match:
|
| t: | Title searches only the title field, e.g. t:pathway will return results with the word "pathway" in the title. |
| a: | Author e.g. a:NSW Health. Locates the resources with "NSW Health" as an author. |
| s: | Subject e.g. s:emergency. Locates the resources which has "emergency" in the subject field. Note the subject field is a specific metadata field, this search only considers that field, and will not return results where the word entered appears elsewhere in the resource. |
| d< or d> | Date queries constrain the result set to documents that were modified/created during a specified time period. For date querying purposes, the search will look for the date modified, the date created and the HTTP server's last modified date (in that order). E.g. d<1jan1600 returns documents that were modified/created before the 1st of January 1600. |
| [ ] | Dysjunction operator acts like an OR in a Boolean language. The results will contain any document that has at least one of the query terms, e.g. [mighty brave] army. A full answer to this query will include the word army and one or more of mighty or brave. |
| ! | Negation operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from the fully matching results, e.g. caesar !brutus. A full answer to this query will include the word caesar but no occurrence of the word brutus. Unlike the mandatory exclusion operator (see below), partial results presented in subsequent result tiers may contain the word brutus. |
| - | Mandatory exclusion operator, excludes all documents that contain the negated query from all results. This is similar to the NOT operator in a Boolean language, e.g. caesar -antony. A full answer to this query will include the word caesar but no occurrence of the word antony. Unlike the negation operator (see above), no results will contain the word antony in the indexable part of the text. The partial results are those which satisfy the mandatory constraint (no antony) but which do not contain caesar. |
| ` ` | Near (proximity) operator (backquotes) requires that the query words appear, in any order, within 15 words of each other, e.g. `army march`. The full answer to this query will be those documents that include the word army within 15 words of march (in any order). |
Please contact the ARCHI office for more assistance.
