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..DATABASES: Cheat Sheet

One stop shop to learn about the variety of databases available to ISU

Using Symbols to Search Databases

Databases commonly use letters, characters, and symbols to get the database to perform specific functions in the search. These symbols can vary between databases. The Cheat Sheets below list what symbol or word(s) works in a given database.

Cheat Sheet July 28, 2025

 

Summon

Discovery

Service

ISU

Catalog

EBSCO

JSTOR

Project Muse

Web of Knowledge

default

AND

AND

AND

AND

AND

AND

AND

All of these

AND

AND

AND

AND

AND

(case sensitive)

AND

OR

Any of these

OR

OR

OR

OR

OR

OR

NOT

AND NOT

AND NOT

NOT

NOT

NOT

NOT

Stemming

# (word stems)

~ (various spellings)

Lemmatization

Truncation

(any #)

*

[*x] or $x

*

*

*

& (plurals only)

*

*

& (plurals only)

Wildcard

(one char)

?
(1 char)

?
(1 char)

? (1 char)
# (0-1 char)

?
(1 char)

?

?

phrase

"..."

"..."

"..."
W1

"..."

"..."

"..."

proximity

(x is any number)

NEAR/x
N/x

near,
any order

PRE/x
P/x

within,
in order

Nx
near,
any order

Wx
within,
in order

"..."~x

near, any order

none

NEAR/x

near,
any order

SAME

address only

limit to full text?

yes

all fulltext

(print & elec)

yes

all fulltext

all fulltext

no

limit to peer-reviewed?

yes

no

yes

all peer-review

all peer-review

no

punctuation

ignore

ignore

ignore

ignore

ignore

ignore

Extras

Capitalized field codes

word^x

importance

Field codes

Cheat Sheet 2 of July 28, 2025

 

PubMed
MEDLINE

ProQuest

GeoScience World

Ovid

OT Seeker

default

AND

AND

OR

AND

AND

All of these

AND

AND

AND

AND

AND

OR

Any of these

 OR

OR

OR

OR

OR

NOT

NOT 

AND NOT

NOT

NOT

NOT

Stemming

Automatic term mapping

yes

Truncation

(any #)

*

*

[*x] or $x

*

$

:

*

Wildcard

(one char)

 automatic

?
(1 char)

#

$x (0-9 char)

? (0-1 char)

phrase

"..."
"…"[field:~0] 

"..."

"..."

[default]

"..."

proximity

(x is any number)

"…"[field:~x] 
any order in same field

NEAR/x
N/x

near, any order

PRE/x
P/x

within, in order

ADJx

within, any order

.xy./FREQ=n

number occurrences

limit to full text?

yes

yes

no

yes

no

limit to peer-reviewed?

 no

yes

no

no

all peer-review

punctuation

 

ignore

hyphen

Extras

 Field tags

CH3CH2OH

capitalization

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