LibGuides: A Lilly Library Home: Database Search Tips

Proximity & Truncation Searching

Some databases allow you to find words near each other (proximity) and or search word roots (truncation):

Proximity searching offers two advantages:
1) You will see a smaller set of more relevant articles and
2) Your search words will be in the same sentence or paragraph instead of separated across the text of the article.

Truncation searching offers the advantage of searching for variations of the search words.

Database	Examples of Proximity & Truncation
EBSCO: 10,000+ current full text journals	Olympics Brazil finds 6045 articles Olympics n5 Brazil finds 966 articles n5 means find these words within 5 words of each other. Try n10 or n12 to find the words a little farther apart. Olympi# searches Olympics, Olympian, Olympiad, etc.
JSTOR: 1000+ full text journals (First volume to last 3 years)	Olympics Brazil finds 716 articles "Olympics Brazil"~10 finds 16 articles ~10 means find these words within 10 words of each other. Brasil# searches Brasil, Brasilian, Brasilians
Nexis-Uni: 1000s of newspapers from around the world	intifada w/5 Gaza! Gaza! searches Gaza, Gaza’s, Gazans
Indianapolis Star: Full text of articles 1991-present	Colts N/10 Draft farm* searches: farm, farms, farmer, farming