Wildcards, Boolean and Proximity Operators, and Precedence
You can use Boolean operators, wildcard and truncation characters, as
well as adjacency operators to adjust your search.
Wildcard and Truncation Changes
The wildcard and truncation characters let you create more powerful searches
by looking for alternate spellings and forms of words.
The wildcard character (?) can be used in place of a single character
in your search terms, when more than one letter is likely to fit that
space. The wildcard character can be used at the end or in the middle
of a word.
The truncation character (*) is used to replace zero or more characters
at the end of a word.
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This Operator:
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Example Search:
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What It Finds:
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? (wildcard)
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educat??
wom?n
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Articles containing educator and educated.
Articles containing the words woman, women, and womyn.
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* (truncation)
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educat*
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Articles containing educator, educated, and education.
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Boolean Operators
Boolean operators connect your search words and treat them differently
than a search phrase—to either broaden or limit your
search.
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This Operator:
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Example Search:
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What It Finds:
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OR
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bush OR cheney
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Articles with one or both terms.
Remember: or gives you more.
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AND
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microsoft AND gates
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Articles with both of two terms in same paragraph.
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AND NOT
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java AND NOT coffee
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Articles with the first term (java), but NOT the second term (coffee)
in the same paragraph.
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Adjacency Operators
Adjacency operators let your control how closely the two search words
are positioned to each other in the articles ProQuest finds. Using an
adjacency operator limits your search results, because you’re constraining
what constitutes a match.
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This Operator:
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Example Search:
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What It Finds:
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Within
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education W/5 internet
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One word must be within a specified number of words of another
word.
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Not Within
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mississippi NOT W/3 river
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One word must NOT be within a specified number of words of another
word.
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Preceded by
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european PRE/2 community
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One word must precede another word by a specified number of words.
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Within Doc
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baseball W/Doc michael jordan
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Two words must appear in the same article.
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Using Boolean and Adjacency Operators
You can always combine multiple search strategies to focus your search
to ensure that you find just the articles you want. Here are some examples
of more complex searches.
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These Operators:
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Example Search:
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What It Finds:
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OR and Within
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trend W/5 (internet OR web)
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Articles on Internet trends or web trends. Using OR will broaden
the search, but using Within limits the search.
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AND NOT and Within Doc
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java AND NOT coffee W/Doc sun
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Articles about Sun’s Java technology, but not articles on growing
coffee. Using AND NOT and using Within Doc both limit the search.
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OR and
Preceded by
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military policy PRE/1 (U.S. OR american)
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Articles covering U.S. military policy as well as articles referring
to American military policy.
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AND and
Not Within
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herniated disk AND spinal cord NOT W/5 lumbar
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Articles about spinal cords and herniated disks in the cervical
and thoracic regions of the spine, but not the lumbar region.
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Precedence and Parentheses
ProQuest interprets your search from left to right. However, it observes
an order of precedence with respect to operators.
OR has precedence over AND
ProQuest gives the OR operator precedence over the AND operator. This
means, if you enter cat AND dog OR pet, ProQuest interprets the
search as cat AND (dog OR pet). All the articles your search finds
will contain the word cat, and will also contain the word dog, the word
pet, or the words dog and pet.
Using Parentheses
You can change the order of precedence for your search by using parentheses.
Surrounding terms with parentheses forces them to be evaluated together.
To change the search in the previous example to find articles that contain
both cat and dog within the same paragraph or articles that contain just
pet, add parentheses: (cat AND dog) OR pet.
Precedence and Operators
Precedence is not limited to operators. It extends to cover anything
that you can include in a search, including fields, operators, and phrases.
The following list details the order of precedence (from highest to lowest)
that ProQuest observes when interpreting your search:
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Operator
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Example:
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Becomes:
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A phrase
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"big yellow dog" OR pet
cat AND dog OR pet
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(big yellow dog) OR pet
cat AND (dog OR pet)
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OR
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cat OR dog
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cat OR dog
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PRE/n
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cat AND dog PRE/2 pet
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cat AND (dog PRE/2 pet)
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W/n
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cat AND dog W/2 pet
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cat AND (dog W/2 pet)
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AND with a search field
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cat AND Sub(dog) OR pet
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cat AND (Sub(dog) OR pet)
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AND NOT with a search field
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cat AND NOT dog AND pet
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cat AND NOT (dog AND pet)
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W/DOC
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cat W/DOC dog AND pet
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cat W/DOC (dog AND pet)
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Precedence and Advanced Search
When you enter a search using AND NOT by typing it into Basic Search
or typing it onto a single row in Advanced, the search applies the AND
NOT to everything after it. For example, when you search for cat AND
NOT dog AND pet, it searches for cat AND NOT (dog AND pet).
This can cause confusion for new users who only want to exclude a single
term from their search.
To solve this problem, ProQuest handles AND NOT differently than other
Boolean operators within Advanced Search. When you select AND NOT using
the dropdown on the left next to a row, that criteria is automatically
moved to the end of the query when it is interpreted by the ProQuest search
engine.
For example if you enter:
Row 1: cat
Row 2: AND NOT dog
Row 3: AND pet
Your search will be interpreted as: (cat AND pet) AND NOT dog
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