Searching Tips

Types of Searches

"Search for Data" is an integrated search that queries the metadata records on archived studies, the full text of the documentation, the variables (when available), and the related citations.
The bibliography search only searches the citations, not the full text of the publication.
The variable search indexes the question text, answer text, variable label, variable name, and any note text associated with the variable.

Searching is not case sensitive. RACE and race return the same results.
The search engine uses quotation marks to do phrase searching.
If you enter multiple words, they are treated as a default Boolean "and" so you get results that have all the words. Boolean operators ("and," "or," and "not") are ignored.
You can omit terms by preceding them with a minus sign. If I wanted all studies that discuss recidivism, but not studies focused on predicting recidivism, I would enter recidivism -predict.
Do not use an asterisk (*) to match partial words. The search engine automatically performs "stemming," meaning that partial-word matches should appear in search results (more info).
Field searching has been replaced by facets, which appear in the right column on the results page.