The Social Contract - Search Help Information

Fields

The following article fields can be searched:

• Title
• Author
• Summary (the concise shaded summary or abstract at the start of many articles).
• Keywords (the list of keywords included with many articles).
• Body - the article text itself.

Basic Search

The basic search mechanism will search for a word or phrase in the any text that is published for articles on the website. The following fields will be searched: title, summary, keywords, and body (the actual article). The article author field will not be searched - if you want to search for articles by an author, see the advanced search.

The search mechanism ignores formatting, so plain text as well as text that is formatted in uppercase, bold, italics, quotes, etc., will be searched. (The search mechanism is case-insensitive and formatting-insensitive).

You can specify multiple words, in which case all of the words will be matched against the article fields. The search will be successful if all of the words are found anywhere in a specific article field (a "logical and" relationship). If you place quotes around a phrase, that exact phrase will be searched for.

Here are some examples of searching against an article text that contains
"A Walk in the Woods today."

Searching for:	Result:
woods	success
WOODS today	success
"woods today"	success
walk today	success
"walk today"	failure
walk tomorrow	failure
ood	success
ood today	success
"ood"	success

Note that you can not search for different words across different fields. For example, you can search for Woods today across all article fields, but you can not search for Woods in the title and simultaneously search for today in the article body. That search would succeed only if both woods and today were both present in one of the article fields, such as the title.

The last example ("ood") illustrates that the search mechanism does not use quotes to delimit words. Quotes can be used to specify a phrase, but if a single string of characters is to be searched for, the results will be the same whether you place the string in quotes or not.

TIP: use quotes is to specify a search phrase of more than one word that must be matched exactly. For example, "walk in the woods".

TIP: make your search phrase longer to refine and limit results that are returned. For example, a search for market wages will match fewer results than will a search for wages.

TIP: in order to search for variations in spelling and word use, abbreviate or truncate the search words. For example, a search for local culture will match: "localized some words multicultural", "local some words culture", etc.

Advanced Search

The advanced search mechanism searches for words and phrases as described above. In addition, you can further qualify your search with advanced search constraints, described below. The advanced constraints must all match in order to return a success (a "logical and" relationship).

• The keyword phrase is optional. If you specify it, the phrase will be searched for as described above, but with additional advanced constraints if you specify them. If you omit the phrase, the other advanced constraints will be used.
• The posted after and posted before dates allow you to curtail your search to articles within a certain date range. You can specify one or both dates. For example, you could search for all articles published in the last six months by specifying a date range but not specifying a keyword phrase.
  TIP: Be somewhat generous when specifying dates.
• The category allows you to specify which issues you want to search. You can let this selection default to all categories, or you can select one or more specific issues to search.
• The search field allows you to specify which text fields to search for: title, summary, body, both title and summary, or both summary and body. You can let this selection default in order to search all text fields.
  TIP: It is usually a good idea to first search just the title and summary. This will keep the search from returning a large number of results based on searching entire article bodies.

Author Search

The author search mechanism allows you to find all articles published by a given author.

TIP: in order to match all variations of the full name, simply specify all or most of the last name. For example, a search for "smith" will match "Dr. John R. Smithe III, PhD".