[Population Index on the Web]

How to Search Population Index

Population Index uses a very simple interface that allows you to search the published database for 1986-2000 by

You can also search for any combination of these fields. For example, you can search for papers by Ansley Coale on mortality in the United States published between 1990 and 1999 (you will find two).

Specifying a Query

To specify a query, you follow these simple steps:
  1. Type one or more search words in the author, subject, region, or free text fields, as explained in more detail in the discussion of each field.

  2. Specify a year or range of years if you want to restrict the search.

  3. Specify a few options, or accept the defaults provided in the query form.

  4. Press the button labelled "Search" to submit your request to our server.
If you want to erase every field to start a new query, you press the button labelled "Clear".

Our search engine strips all punctuation (including commas, periods, hyphens, and parentheses), as well as apostrophes and diacritical marks. We also ignore initials and a few common words such as "and", "or", "of", and "the".

Search Results

The output of a query includes the following:
  1. An echo of your query exactly as the search engine has interpreted it, so you can check that we got it right.

  2. A statement of the number of hits, or citations that contain all the words you have specified.

  3. A listing of the corresponding citations (if you got one or more hits).
If there are no entries in the database indexed under one of the search words you typed, you will see a message listing the word. Hopefully this will help you recast the query.

If there are no hits, but no particular word is listed, it means that the particular combination of words you specified does not occur in the database.

Depending on the options you have chosen, your hits will either be displayed in a short listing limited to bibliographic information or in a longer listing which includes the abstract.

The listing includes up to 25 citations, listed by accession number in reverse chronological order. If there are more than 25 hits, you see a button at the end of the listing that can be pressed to get the next 25 hits. (The number 25 is a default, you can change the size of the batches to any number between 1 and 100.)