Searching
The search bar at the top of each page searches the entire repository. Selecting a category in the dropdown menu will limit the search to documents in that category. The following fields are searched when using this search bar:
- Title
- Description/Abstract
- Author/Creator
- Publisher
- Bibliographic Citation
- Docket Number
- GID Identifier
- Court of Jurisdiction
- Full Text of the document
Each search result contains a snippet of the document where the search text was found for relevant context.
Special Characters
Quotation marks can be used to search exact phrases. Example: "foreign intelligence surveillance act" provides results in instances where this exact phrase appears. A document that contains the words separately but not the exact phrase would not appear in the returned results.
A minus sign can be used to exclude terms from the search. Example: electronic -surveillance provides results in instances where a document includes the word electronic but does not include the word surveillance.
Facets
Facets allow you to limit or narrow the search results or browse by particular categories. You can also search within text facets to narrow the results. The number in parentheses ( ) is the count of relevant results for each selection. Facets available include:
- Author
- Publisher
- Court of Jurisdiction
- Docket Number
- Document Type
- Date Created (range)
- Date Issued (range)
Within a particular field, facets work using "OR" logic, so selecting multiple entries for a particular facet (such as Author) will filter the document results to those that include any of the selected items.
When using multiple facets simultaneously, the facets use "And" logic, so choosing a pair of authors and a publisher will return documents who have either of the selected authors and the specific publisher.
If one of the authors matches a document but the selected publisher does not, that result will also be filtered out, so use multiple facets only when you are looking for a very specific subset of results.