AUAC – Association for the Understanding of Ancient Cultures

Bulletin of Nabataean Studies (BNS)

Bibliography

Boolean search options

When none of the following boolean options is specified, the search engine automatically puts a + in front of all words, which means that this word must be present in every row returned. The other options are:

+ A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every row returned.
- A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any row returned.
< > These two operators are used to change a word’s contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The < operator decreases the contribution and the > operator increases it.
( ) Parentheses are put round sub-expressions to give them higher precedence in the search.
~ A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word’s contribution to the row relevance to be negative. It’s useful for marking noise words. A row that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the minus operator.
* An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it is appended to the word, or fragment, not prepended.
" " Double quotes at the beginning and end of a phrase, matches only rows that contain the complete phrase, as it was typed.

Boolean search examples

schmid petra find rows that contain at least one of these words.
+schmid +petra find rows that contain both words.
+schmid petra find rows that contain the word «schmid», but rank it higher if it also contain «petra».
+schmid -petra find rows that contain the word «schmid» but not «petra».
+schmid +(>petra <pottery) find rows that contain the word «schmid» and «petra», or «schmid» and «pottery» (in any order), but rank «schmid petra» higher than «schmid pottery».
nabat* find rows that contain the word «nabat», «nabataean», «nabatean», and «nabatäer».
"nabataean pottery" find rows that contain the word words «nabataean pottery» (in that exact order).