Gale Help

Logging-On	Index Terms	Boolean Operators
Limiting by Date, Full-text & Journal	History Function	Wildcards & Truncation
Phrase Searching	Proximity	Nesting Operators
Stop Words	Empty Search	Citing an Article

You need to know the password to use this database. If you do not know the password please see the librarian, call the library at 786-0855 ext. 230 or e-mail to library@mildred-elley.edu. Occasionally the password will change so if your password no longer works please come in and get the new password from the librarian.

1 -When you click on the link to Gale at http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/lath15350 you are taken to their log-in page. Enter the password and click on "Proceed."

2 - You will be taken directly to the Advanced search page. Enter the terms you want to search for in the text-boxes; from the pull-down menu on the left choose the appropriate Index field to search; and choose the desired Boolean term on the right.

Index Terms	Boolean Terms
Keyword - will look for search term in title, author and subject fields.	AND - will look for articles with BOTH of the words
Title - will search for this word in the titles.	AND - will look for articles with BOTH of the words
Textword - will search for this word in the text of the articles.	OR - will look for articles with EITHER of the words
Subject - will search for this word in the subject headings for the articles.	OR - will look for articles with EITHER of the words
Author - can be used to search for a particular author.	NOT - will EXCLUDE any article with this word
Abstract - will search for words in the abstract (an abstract is a summary).	NOT - will EXCLUDE any article with this word

Return to Top

LIMITS - these will reduce the number of articles retrieved

Articles with Text - This box is automatically checked. This means that any article that is retrieved will have the full text of that article. Over half of the articles in this database are not full-text. If you do not get any hits, click on this box to uncheck it. Now you will search the whole database, but there will be no text available.

By Date - You should limit by date if you are interested in a certain time period. For instance, if you are researching AIDS and want information written in the last year you could click on the "after" radio button and choose "2000" from the pull-down menu.

By Journal - A journal is an academic magazine. For the differences between journals and magazines click here. To use this function, click on the browse button and choose the journal using the title index. (For instance, if you are looking for Computer World click on the "C.") You can choose up to 10 journals; however, there is no subject list so you cannot choose all the computer journals.

To entries containing the following word(s) - Use this text box to include words that MUST be in the articles.

HISTORY - the history list can be a very useful tool. You can combine search sets by ANDing or ORing or NOTing the sets together. See example. In this search, I first searched for the words "help desk." This was set R1. In the second set, R2, I searched for "computer OR computers OR computing". In the third set, R3, I combined the two previous sets by using the phrase "R1 AND R2."

Return to Top

WILDCARDS & TRUNCATION

* - The asterisk can stand for any number of characters from zero up. Use "comput*" to search for computer, computers, computing, computational, etc. at the same time without having to remember all of the variations.

? - The question mark stands for exactly one character and is useful when you are not sure of how a word is spelled. For example, a search for rel?v?nce would find relevance even if you cannot remember if it is an "e" then an "a" or the other way around.

! - The exclamation point is used for one or no characters. "Cat!" would retrieve cat and cats but not category. This can be helpful for British / American variants of words like color. If you use "col!r" it will retrieve color (American spelling) and colour (British spelling).

Return to Top

PHRASE SEARCHING

To search for a phrase put the term in quotes. Example: "Marketing Research." This will search all articles for these words in this order. A search for "library school" (a school that teaches Library Science) will not find the term "school library" (a library in a school).
The term Marketing W1 Research will do the same thing as putting the two words in quotes. See Proximity.

Return to Top

PROXIMITY

Proximity operators are important because words that are near each other are more likely to be related than the same words at opposite ends of the article.
A proximity operator allows you to specify how close the two or more search terms must be to each other. There are two components to every proximity operator:
A LETTER that indicates the DIRECTION.
A NUMBER that indicates the DISTANCE in words.

There are two ways to search for words close to each other.
Wn - The W stands for within. Since this is a letter it means direction. This means that the first search term occurs before the second search term.
The n stands for how many words the second term can be after the first.
Example: computer W3 virus - this will retrieve records where "virus" occurs three or less words after "computer." This will find articles that say computer virus and computer-related virus. It will not find articles that say virus on a computer.

Nn - The N stands for near. Since this is a letter it means direction. This means that the order of the search terms does not matter.
The n stands for how many words the second term can be after the first.
Example: computer N3 virus - this will retrieve articles where the words computer and virus are within 3 words of each other. It will find computer virus, computer-related virus and virus on a computer.

Proximity operators DO NOT work with nesting operators (parentheses).

Return to Top

NESTING OPERATORS

Search terms can be nested to add more precision to a Boolean search. Boolean operators are evaluated in a specific order - NOT then AND then OR. If you were searching for fleas in either cats or dogs and entered the search term "cats OR dogs AND fleas" since AND is evaluated before OR it would perform "dogs AND fleas" and then OR cats onto that set. So you would get articles that mention both dogs and fleas and articles that mention cats but do not necessarily mention fleas.
To get around this problem you can use parentheses by entering the search term "(cats OR dogs) and fleas." This term will first put articles that mention cats or dogs into a set and then combine these articles with articles that mention fleas.
For a pictorial example of the difference parentheses can make click here.

Return to Top

STOP WORDS

To search for an operator such as OR, AND, NOT, A, AN, OF, TO, etc. put the word in quotes.