Search Tips
- Searching Dissertations
- The Country and Awarding Institution pull-down menus list only countries or institutions for which there is a record in the catalog.
- There are currently more than 90 countries and over 1200 institutions represented.
- CRL has catalog records for over 800,000 foreign doctoral dissertations.
- When you choose a country or an institution, all the institutions in that country will be brought to the top of the institution list and highlighted.
- The system searches only for a single institution name, not for all institutions in a country.
- Adjacency
- Multiple words are searched together as one phrase.
Example: world health organization - Wildcards
- Words may be right-hand truncated using an asterisk. '*' for 1-5 characters, '**' for open-ended truncation, '?' to replace a single character anywhere within a word.
Examples: environment* polic*, comput**, wom?n - Boolean Operators
- Use "and" or "or" to specify multiple words in any field, any order. Use "and not" to exclude words.
Example: stocks and bonds
Example: (alaska or canada) and (adventure and not vacation) - Proximity Operators
- Use "near" to specify words close to each other, in any order.
Example: california near university - Field limits
- A field limit causes the system to search only the specified field for the specified word(s).
- Grouping
- Keyword search results are usually grouped by relevance to bring the most likely titles to the top of the list. Each group represents a similar level of relevance and results are sorted within the group by date or title. To get an ungrouped result set, use boolean operators to form a complex query.