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Search Options
You can specify three options to control the processing
of your query:
The Match Option
The first option you can specify controls how the words you type
are matched to the entries in the database. You have two
choices:
- Beginning: We match every word
that begins with the root you have typed.
For example "child" will match "child",
"childbearing", "childlessness",
and "children".
This is the default setting.
- Complete: We match only complete words,
so you would have to type "childbearing" or
"childlessness", depending on which word you wanted.
Searches based on complete matches are somewhat faster.
Example 1: You are interested in the
health status of indigenous people. Searching
for "indi" in the subject field
with the default settings allows you to find
entries on "Indians, North American",
"Indians, South American",
"indigenous population", and
"indigenous health services".
The Format Option
The second option gives you a choice of format:
- Short: includes the bibliographic
information for the citation. This includes the
author(s), title, and all relevant fields from the
following list: foreign title, book title, series,
edition, volume, number, publication order number, ISBN,
Library of Congress number, month, year, pages,
publisher, distributor, language of publication, and
language of summary.
- Long: includes, in addition, the
abstract, and all relevant fields from the
following list: references to citations of items
in a collection, translations, and related citations,
address for correspondence, location of the original,
and source of the citation.
Note that the address for correspondence was current at
the time the entry was published, not necessarily at
the time you are searching (see residential mobility, migration :-)
Example 1:You have just run a query using
the short format and decide you would like to see
the abstracts. Use the "Go back" feature of your
browser (usually represented by a left arrow in the
toolbar) to return to the query form,
click on the radio button for "Long format",
and press the "Search" button. The citations now
appear in full glory.
The Max Hits Option
The third option controls the maximum number of
citations that our engine will send you in each batch.
The default is 25, but you can increase this number up
to 100. Let's say you set it to n.
If your query returns more than n hits, we will
show you only the n most recent citations, in
reverse chronological order (as determined by their
appearance in Population Index).
Immediately after the listing, you will see a button
that allows you to get the "next n hits", continuing in
reverse chronological order. Repeating this procedure
allows you to retrieve all hits in batches of n.
Example 1: You run an author search on yourself
and find 49 hits (well done!). The search engine will
show only the most recent 25 ones. You go back to the form,
type 50 in the Max Hits field, and press the Search button.
The listing now includes all 49 entries, and you
can print a nicely formatted version of your bibliography.
Example 2:A couple of students are not sure how to search
for a particular subject. They set Max Hits to 10 to get a quick
sense of the number and type of entries retrieved under various
keywords. When they have focused on the target and have a search
that will return 97 hits, they set Max Hits to 100, run the
search, and save the output to disk for later examination.
