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Quick Guides — Using Search Operators in Justis
Searches using Justis are controlled by a flexible system of searching tools known as operators. This guide describes the different operators, and looks at ways to use them to narrow or widen a search. Operators can be in either upper case or lower case.
- Boolean operators
- Wild cards
- Parentheses
- Date operators
- Proximity operators
- Quotation marks
- Fuzzy operator
- Hints and Tips
Boolean operators
The Boolean operators “and”, “or”, and “not” combine and exclude terms in particular ways.
| AND | The AND operator helps you to make your query more precise. When you use it, only documents that contain all of the terms separated by AND will be retrieved. For example, the query fishing AND "united kingdom" will only retrieve documents that contain both the word “fishing” and the phrase “united kingdom”. |
| OR | The OR operator helps you to search for related words. For example, the query murder OR manslaughter will find documents referring to either “murder” or “manslaughter” or both. |
| NOT | The NOT operator allows you to exclude documents that contain a particular word or phrase. For example, packaging NOT plastic finds documents that refer to “packaging” but excludes any that refer to “plastic”. This operator must be used with care, because a document may specify that it does not contain information on a particular topic. However, it can be used safely with fields that have a controlled vocabulary, for example to exclude particular document types. |
In Justis, a default AND operator is assumed between adjacent words, and phrases have to be enclosed in double quotation marks.
To use Boolean operators within a field, just type them in, with a space on each side, as shown in the examples above.
Boolean operators can also be used in the Full Text box, even in queries that specify fields:
Judge[denning] AND Subject[tenan*]
CPVCODE[33100000] NOT DOCTYPE[7]
Wild cards
Wild cards provide an easy way to include related words in your query, or to allow for variations in spelling.
| * | The asterisk wild card is used to represent any number (including zero) of characters. It can be used in the middle of a word or at the end. You can use more than one within a word. Use it with care, for example form* will find not just “form” or “forms”, but several other words as well. |
| ? | The question mark wild card is used to represent any single character, in the middle or at the end of a word. You can use more than one within a word. For example, formali?e will find documents containing “formalise” or “formalize” or both versions. |
| - | The hyphen wild card is useful for terms that can be written as one word or two words (or more than two words) or hyphenated. Type a hyphen (with no spaces) between the two words, and all three possibilities will be searched for. For example data-base will find documents containing “data base”, “database” or “data-base”, or any combination of these terms. |
Parentheses
Parentheses define the logical order in which a multiple-term query is interpreted. For example, the following query will find documents concerning both aunts and children:
aunt* AND (child* OR son OR sons OR daughter*)
Without the parentheses, many irrelevant documents about sons or daughters that were not concerned with aunts would be retrieved, because the query would be interpreted as:
(aunt* AND child*) OR son OR sons OR daughter*
Date operators
Some Justis databases feature date range searching. This lets you specify that hits must contain a range of dates in certain fields.
| AFTER 03/12/1996 | means documents must be dated after 3 December 1996. |
| BEFORE 19950719 | means documents must be dated before 19 July 1995. |
| ON 3 Sep 1994 | means documents must be dated 3 September 1994. |
| FROM 1996 TO 1997 | means documents must have been published in 1996 or 1997. |
Most databases contain at least one field that can be searched for a range of dates, either a full date or a year. Consult the on-screen Help for the fields in a particular database for details of the formats that are supported.
Proximity operators
Proximity operators can be regarded as more precise forms of the AND operator. They ensure that retrieved documents must not only contain both terms, but that the terms must be within a specified number of characters of each other. Spaces are ignored when counting characters, but punctuation marks are included.
| A WITHIN 5 OF B | means A must be no more than 5 words away from B, in either direction. |
| A NEAR B | uses a fixed distance of 10 words. It is the equivalent of A WITHIN 10 OF B but is quicker to type. |
Proximity operators can be very useful when searching European databases for phrases. Phrases such as “product liability” may have been translated as “liability for the product”. By using a query such as product NEAR liability you can make sure both forms of the phrase are found.
Quotation marks
In Justis, phrases must always be enclosed in double quotation marks.
You also need to enclose neutral citations and other citations that include brackets in double quotes, for example "[2002] EWCA Civ 621" and "[1999] 2 AC 554". Please note that this does not apply to citations that you search for in fields that support J-Link reference searching.
Fuzzy operator
Fuzzy searching attempts to find words that are similar to the one that you specified by inserting, deleting and substituting characters. In addition to spelling variations and presence or absence of diacritics, fuzzy searches can help to include typing errors in your results, such as transposed characters, missing characters, duplicated characters and adjacent characters on the keyboard.
To tell Justis to perform a fuzzy search, add a tilde to the end of your search term:
donoghue~
Optionally, you can specify the precision that Justis will apply when it tries to find words that are similar to the one you provide. A precision of 1 will find only your word. A precision of 0 will find huge numbers of variations. The default (if you do not specify a number) is 0.5.
donoghue~0.7
Hints and Tips
Using symbols
Some of the operators can be represented by symbols, which work in exactly the same way as the operators themselves.
AND & OR | NOT ! ON = WITHIN OF W/
Using symbols instead of words can make entering queries quicker and simpler.
What does “Boolean” mean?
It comes from the surname of George Boole, the mathematician who developed the and/or/not system of relationships between entities.
4th February 2008
