Help: Advanced Search

The CQ Voting and Elections Collection's Advanced Search Form offers users the ability to conduct a deeper and more focused search on presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections information. Because the nature of the Collection, and of elections in general, is to provide lots of documents and information tied to the same specific event – for example, the Collection includes 52 election returns documents on the 2000 presidential election alone — Advanced Search provides a powerful tool for drilling down to find exactly what you need. To search for a complete phrase, place it in quotes. Use search operators to narrow the search: and, or, not, *, w/#. You can also search across all your CQ Press Electronic Library sites.

"Search Titles Only" (a selection just below the keyword box) can be a quick shortcut for finding specific elections returns documents, which are all titled consistently, as well as other documents. For example, typing "Summary" in the keyword box will call up all election returns at the national level; "All Districts" and "All Counties" will call up all House, Senate, and gubernatorial election returns for particular states. Combined with a year, office, state, or other term in the keyword box, this search can be very useful.

"Search Specific Elections" allows you to focus your search by primary vs. general election, by year, and by state.

Under "Election Types," "General" captures documents on general elections (as opposed to primary elections); "Primary" captures documents on primary elections (as opposed to general elections); and "Any" captures everything.

"Election Years" captures all documents relevant to understanding elections in the years selected.

"Election States" captures all documents that cover one state in particular.

These search options, combined with document types, can provide powerful tools for finding the documents you need. Of course, you do not need to use all these tools to use the Collection effectively.

List of Search Commands and Search Operators

Term	Function	How to Use	Example
AND	Finds one term and a second term	Separate the words with a space, or separate with "and"	original jurisdiction; original and jurisdiction
" "	Finds terms in an exact sequence	Use quotation marks around the sequence	"original jurisdiction"
OR	Finds one term or another term	Separate terms with "or"	House or Senate
NOT	Finds one term but not another	Separate terms with "not"	House not Senate
*	Finds any terms containing a specific sequence of letters	Type the letters, using the asterisk symbol (*) as a wildcard	*trusts
?	Finds variations of a term	Replace letters with the ? symbol	wom?n returns woman, women
w/	Finds terms that are within a certain number of words of each other	Place terms in quotations, followed by a "w" and a slash mark (/) and the number of words which can occur between the search terms	senate w/4 hearings returns Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings

Document Types

Document Type	Description
Biography	Biographical information as well as demographic data on members of Congress.
Case Summary	Summary and CQ analysis of major Supreme Court decisions relating to Congress and its members.
Election Analysis	Summary and analysis of specific elections, taken from CQ Press sources.
Election Returns	Results of specific elections.
Encyclopedia Entry	General summaries of voting and election issues.
Facts and Figures	Tables, graphs, and other statistical information.
Legislative Analysis	Reporting and analysis on legislation.
Primary Source	Full-text or excerpts of primary source material relating to Congress.

Sorting Your Search Results

On the Search Form, you may elect to sort your results by relevancy or by title, using the "Sort Results By" drop-down menu. Once on the Search Results page, you may elect to view your results by relevancy, alphabetically by title, by document type, or by event date. Viewing by document type may be helpful when search results call up a number of elections returns documents. By default, your results are sorted according to relevancy.

Displaying Search Results

You may also determine how many search results you want to view per Web page. The default is thirty results per page, but you can choose as few as five results per page or as many as thirty by adjusting the "Number of Results Displayed per Page" option on the search page.