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Scope: This search includes all Statistical Science Web archives except for the job advertisement database. To search the advertisements see the Job Search page.
Search Help
To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. If you want to do a more refined search, most queries which work with AltaVista will also work here. For example sas -excel finds documents mentioning SAS but not Excel, +s-plus sas finds documents mentioning S-Plus and preferably SAS as well, biometric* finds biometrics as well as biometrician, and "generalized linear models" finds the complete phrase. A more careful search for a phrase, allowing for different spellings and word endings, might be "generali* linear model*". Detailed help follows below.
Natural Language queries:
A simple string of terms like sas excel spss will find documents containing one or more of the terms. Better matches, preferably containing more than one of the terms, will be listed first. A natural language question like what are generalized linear models? will also work.
Requiring/Excluding Words:
To require that a word appear in all of the results, attach a "+" to the beginning of the word (for example, to find software on influence diagnostics, you might try +influen* diagnostic* s-plus sas). You can exclude a word from all results by attaching a "-" to it (for example, if you don't want SAS software you might try +influen* diagnostic* s-plus -sas).
Exact Phrases:
If you know that a certain phrase will appear on the page you are looking for, put the phrase in quotes (for example, "against all odds" will find information on the video series by that name.)
Case Sensitivity:
Use only lower case unless you want your search to be case sensitive. If you search for TeX, you'll get only documents that include that word with just that capitalization. If you search for tex, you'll get any document containing that term.
Using Wildcards:
Use an asterisk (*) to broaden your search. For example, use biometr* to find matches for biometry, biometrics or biometrical. Use this if the word you are searching for could have different endings. The asterix can be used anywhere in a word (for example, *gamma will match polygamma and trigamma as well as gamma, and generali*ed will match generalised as well as generalized). To avoid overly broad searches, the asterix can represent at most four letters or numbers (so that biometr* would not find biometrician), and at least three alpha-numeric characters must be included (so that the search term bi* would be ignored).
Wild cards work even within phrases. For example, "generali* linear model*" will match any of the phrases "generalised linear model", "generalized linear model" or "generalized linear models".
Special Characters and Punctuation
Search defines a word as any string of letters and digits that is separated by either: White space, such as spaces, tabs, line ends, or the start or end of a document, or Special characters and punctuation, such as %, $, /, #, and _
Search ignores punctuation except to interpret it as a separator for words. Placing punctuation or special characters between each word, with no spaces between the characters and the words, is also a way to indicate a phrase. For example, against-all-odds is an equally acceptable but less natural syntax for "against all odds". Hyphenated words, such as S-Plus or CD-ROM, also automatically form phrases because of the hyphen.
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