Help: Search

The CQ Voting and Elections Collection's standard Search Form offers users the ability to search for a word or phrase anywhere it appears on the site. Alternatively, users may click the Search Titles Only radio button to narrow their search to instances of the word or phrase in document titles. Boolean operators—for example, "and," "or," "not"—are permitted. See hints, below, on selecting search terms and using Boolean operators.

Users may also filter their search by document type, by topic, or by event date to better zero in on the information they desire. These options may be combined in any manner. For example, you might search for the phrase "campaign finance reform" anywhere it appears in a primary source document that carries a campaign and election process topic of "interest groups." Each filtering option is described in more detail below.

Search Specific Document Types

Each document in the CQ Voting and Elections Collection is placed in one of eight categories: Biography, Case Summary, Election Analysis, Election Returns, Encyclopedia Entry, Facts & Figures, Legislative Analysis, and Primary Source. Click the Search Specific Document Types radio button and then check the boxes to limit your search to documents in one or more of these categories. See the help file on document types for a description of each type.

Search Specific Topics

CQ Press editors have assigned categories to all documents in the CQ Voting and Elections Collection database. To limit your search to documents dealing with a specific campaign and election process issue, click the Campaign and Election Process Topics radio button and select a topic from the drop-down menu. Follow the same procedure to search in any of the other Topic areas.

Search Event Date

The Event Date is the date of a specific event described in a document. For each case summary in the CQ Voting and Elections Collection, the date of the Supreme Court decision is the event date. Election results have event dates that indicate the year or year-range the data was derived.

The Event Date is a powerful tool for focusing your search, especially if used in conjunction with the other search filters. You might, for example, search for all documents that carry the campaign and election process topic of "campaign finance," and an event date between 1981 and 1982. Such a search would reveal all action in Congress on that topic during the first two years of the first administration of Ronald Reagan. You might then modify that search, changing the event dates to 1993-1994. The new search would reveal all action in Congress on campaign finance during the first two years of the first administration of Bill Clinton.

Similarly, you might search for the phrase "electoral college" and vary the event dates from one era to another, to see how discussion of the issue changed over time.

Sorting Your Search Results

On the main 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. 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.