A simple search will look for the search term anywhere in the record. This provides maximum flexibility in searching. The simple search box appears on the SearchWorks start page and in the red banner at the top of each page in SearchWorks, except the Advanced Search page.

On the SearchWorks Start Page

On Every Search Results Page

Keyword Searching

• Enter keywords into the simple search box to retrieve results where matching terms are located in any field.
• By default, results are ordered by relevance, meaning the highest ranked records are those with all terms in a field.
  • Example: wall street journal - Results with "The Wall Street journal" in the title field will appear at the top of the search results. The bottom of the search results will be catalog records where "wall," "street" or "journal" can appear any field (i.e. publisher, notes, subjects).
  • See relevancy in How Searching Works for more information on relavancy ranking.
  • See sorting results in Managing Results for more information.
• Results will include plural/singular forms, common suffix and tense variations of your search terms.
  • Example: happy - The search term "happy" will match records with the term "happy" or "happiness" but not "happen."
  • See stemming in How Searching Works for more information.
• To exclude a term, use the minus "-" sign or "NOT".
  • Example: bass -fish ; bass NOT fish will retrieve all records with the term "bass" and not the terms "fish" or "fishing."

Phrase Searching

Phrase searching can reduce the amount of results retrieved from a keyword search. SearchWorks will treat quotation marks surrounding two or more words as one search term or a "phrase." Quotation marks only work in simple search.

• Example - "William Shakespeare" is considered one term. Only catalog records with the exact phrase "William Shakespeare" will be retrieved.
• Example - "climate change" is considered one term. Automatic word stemming still applies to each word. Records with the exact phrase "climate change" will be ranked the highest. Records with the phrase "climatic change" will also be retrieved but ranked lower in the results.
• Example - "William Shakespeare" Hamlet as the search query. Term 1 is William Shakespeare, term 2 is Hamlet. SearchWorks will retrieve records where "William Shakespeare" appears as a phrase and Hamlet appears anywhere in the record. Records with term 1 and term 2 in the same field will be ranked the highest.

Targeting Your Search

Target certain fields for SearchWorks to search by clicking on the downward arrow to display the drop-down menu and selecting an index.

Everything - A match of the search terms can be in any field. For instance, the terms could match in the title or in the table of contents. "Everything" is the default search if nothing is selected from the drop-down menu. Author - A match must be in an author field of a record. This includes people, organizations and corporations responsible for creating or contributing to a work. Title - Searches all titles of a work, including uniform and variant titles, series title and related and included works. Subject terms - Searches standard and local subject headings and genre terms, including names, topics, regions, eras. Call number - Searches for catalog records with a specific call number or beginning of a call number. You can enter the punctuation and spacing, or not - e.g. KF5402 .D32 is the same as KF5402D32.