Search Tips

The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2006
Search Tips

General Tips

The following tips will help you to improve your search results:

Be specific: Adding more search terms provides fewer more accurate search results.

Consider language: To retrieve all relevant items, enter your search term in a variety of languages e.g. “French AND Français AND Francese”.

Use the PRE operator to search for exact phases: When looking for items that discuss farming in the EU, enter farming PRE/10 EU. This search will find the term farming where it precedes within 10 characters or spaces of the term EU.

Mix phrases and single search terms: e.g. enter “Economic Monetary Union AND inflation”.

Use plural or other word endings:
Use the truncation (wildcard) feature to retrieve various forms of a word, e.g. the term Jew* retrieves items that contain the words Jew, Jews or Jewish.

Try using synonyms: e.g. enter “car OR automobile”.

Field length: Search terms or phrases cannot exceed one hundred characters or twelve words.

Check your spelling: If you type womin instead of women your search will not produce any results, unless you have activated fuzzy searching.

Hyphen (-): used between two words is considered part of a search term and should be included, e.g. A-Day.

Ampersands (&): are recognized as the operator AND.

Double quotation marks (“ ”): should be used when a phrase contains Boolean search operators (AND NOT, AND, OR), e.g. “war and peace”.

Capitalisation: does not affect the results of a search.

Diacritics

Diacritics can be included in a search term by either copying and pasting, or typing a diacritic into the Search. Searching on a term that includes a diacritic, such as attaché, will return results matching both attaché and attache. Likewise, a search on attache will return results matching both attache and attaché.

A useful document that provides information on producing diacritics and other special characters, Typing Accents and Special Characters, is available online from Pennsylvania State University.

Date Range

Date range is used to limit your search to items published within a specified date range. The date range for the archive is 1843 to 2006.

Truncation (wildcard) characters are used to retrieve various forms of a word. The table below shows the various truncation characters and their effects on your search results.

Truncation Character	Replaces	Example Search Term	Example Results
* Asterisk	Any number of characters or numbers	Jew*	Jew, Jews, or Jewish
* Asterisk	Any number of characters or numbers	ap*ed	applied, approved
? Question Mark	A single character or number	wom?n	woman, women

Boolean Search Operators

AND NOT: retrieves items that do not contain a search term, e.g. a search for “inflation AND NOT interest rates” will find items that mention inflation but not interest rates.

AND: retrieves items that contain both of the search terms, e.g. a search for “inflation AND interest rates” will find any item that contains mention both of inflation and interest rates.

OR: retrieves items that contain one or both search terms, e.g. a search for “inflation OR interest rates” will find items that mention inflation, items that mention interest rates, and items that mention both.

Note: If a Boolean search operator appears in a search term or phrase, such as war and peace, it will be interpreted as a search operator. This may lead to irrelevant results. If you are searching for a search term or phrase that contains a Boolean search operator, enclose the term or phrase within double quotation marks, e.g. “war and peace”.

Parentheses ( ): allow you to combine multiple search operators and ensure correct and relevant results. E.g. To retrieve items containing information on savings for men and women, one might enter the following search “men OR women AND savings”. This search would return items containing the words women and savings or only the word men. This search is therefore not providing correct and relevant results. This is because Boolean search operators are applied in the order of AND NOT, AND, OR.

Parentheses have priority over the AND NOT, AND, OR search operators. The search (men OR women) AND savings would retrieve items containing the following words: women and savings, men and savings.

Proximity

PRE operator: finds items containing specified words in the specified order within the number of characters you indicate, e.g. defense PRE/4 budget finds items that contain the word defense preceding the word budget within four words. This function can be vital in returning accurate results from items which present irregular character spacing.

W operator: finds items containing specified words in any order within the number of words you indicate, e.g. defense W/4 budget finds items that contain the word defense within four words of the word budget, regardless of their order (that is, budget could precede or follow defense).

Field Searching

Field Searching is a feature which allows you to conduct searches using specific fields from the metadata of each item. Various fields can be used in conjunction with the Boolean and Proximity search operators to retrieve very specific search results. Below are descriptions of the metadata fields you can search. Please note, when searching the Title field, both the Title and Subtitle fields are included, as the subtitle often includes more relevant subject matter, with the title giving a more imaginative description.

Metadata Field	Description
Title	The individual description of the item.
Subtitle	Additional description of the item, where applicable.
Supptitle	The title of the supplement, where applicable.
Author	The author of the item.
Section	The classification of the item into one of the following topic subdivisions: Arts and Entertainment Business and Finance Classified Advertising Court and Social Display Advertising Economic and Financial Indicators Editorial Leaders Financial and Commercial Tables Law Letters to Editor News News in Brief Obituaries Parliamentary Affairs Railway Monitor Reviews Science and Technology Sport Weather Please note that only one section has been assigned to each item.
Issnum	The issue number of the magazine containing the item.
Illustype	The type of illustration contained within the item. The illustration types are: Photograph Cartoon Map Graph Table Drawing

Advanced Field Searching

The Field Search Example Box, accessible by moving the mouse cursor over the Field Searching Help Icon provides basic field searches. However, it is possible to create your own, more complex, field searches using the techniques shown below:

Purpose	Search Term
To search for items about property	(title contains property) OR (subtitle contains property)
To search for display adverts about property	((title contains property) OR (subtitle contains property)) AND (section contains display advertising)
To search for an item within the business and finance section that includes a photograph about property	((title contains property) OR (subtitle contains property)) AND ((section contains business and finance) AND (illustype contains photograph))
To search for an item about property that does not include letters	((title contains property) OR (subtitle contains property)) AND NOT (section contains letters to editor)