Search
Tips
Submitting
a Search
Basic
Instructions
- Type your search (phrase, keywords etc.) into the Keyword textbox.
- Use Sections to narrow your search if desired (Title, Volume, Year,
Category, Author).
- Click the Search Archive button.
See the topics following directly below for more detailed explanations
and instructions.
Keyword
Searches
Keyword searching is the most popular on the Theology Today web site.
A Keyword search will return results containing at least one occurrence
of at least one of the keywords you enter. This is the least specific type
of search. If you are having trouble getting results for your query, use
this type of search.
For keyword searches, Search will treat anything separated by spaces as
distinct words. If you want to ensure certain names or phrases are treated
as single units -- Pastoral Perspective, Credibility of the Gospel, Black
Theology -- you can use commas as separators. Other than this special use
of commas, Search ignores punctuation.
Remember: Search is not case sensitive under any circumstances, so you
don’t need to worry about capitalization.
Advanced
Boolean Searches
Boolean searching is used mostly by advanced searchers with specific information
needs. The Theology Today Search supports the standard Boolean operators
and syntax: And (and, &); Or (or, |); Not (and not, &!); and related precedence
operators such as (), “”, etc.
- Search is not case sensitive: you can type your query in uppercase or
lowercase.
- You may search for any word except for those in the exception list (for
English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words). Words
in the exception list are ignored during a search. (Words in the exception
list are treated as placeholders in Exact Phrase searches.)
- Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;),
and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
- To use specially-treated characters ( (&), (|), (^), (#), (@), ($),
((), ()) ) in a query, enclose your query in quotes (").
Section
Searching
In addition to choosing a keyword search, you can select a Section of Theology
Today content to target by filling in the desired search text in a specific
input area. For example, if you know the title of an article, the author
of a paper, the year in which a review was written, you can narrow your
search by using these category searches to zero in on what you are looking
for. The following sectionsare available:
- Title - Searching
this field allows you to search just the titles of articles, papers, reviews
and commentaries.
- Category - Selecting
an item from the pull-down list provided of all the sections contained
in Theology Today, you can narrow your search to a specific section of
Theology Today, for example - articles only.
- Volume - Searching
this field allows you to narrow your search to a specific volume
- Year - Searching
this field allows you to narrow your search to a specific year
- Author - Searching
this field allows you to narrow your search to a specific author.
You can use one or more of these section searches at one time. For example,
If you wanted to find an article published by the author named "Charry"
in the year 1982, you could use the Author
and Year
sections to narrow your search.