Picture of Gabriel Egan G a b r i e l   E g a n  .  com

what? where?

Electronic databases for research into Shakespeare and other early modern literature offer a bewildering range of advanced searching features. My paper for the 2005 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America explored these features and complained that each product implements standard practice in a different way. Arising from that exploration, here's a 'cheat sheet' summarizing how to do common advanced searching procedures in each of the 7 products.

Product Automagic Field bundling Truncation Wildcarding Boolean Proximity Comments
WSB gabriel egan hits also egan, gabriel but don't use middle initial keywords = author, title, publisher, notes, reviews, and people * represents zero or more charsv Not implemented and, or, not Not implemented  
ESTC Online i/j and u/v. also auto-truncation in fields author, title, imprint, and subject keyword = author word, title word, subject word, and imprint word ? represents zero or more chars Not implemented and, or, not Not implemented There's a 'command line' search that's too tricky for me to understand
ESTC CD-ROM None keyword = an unspecified collection of fields * represents zero or more chars ? represents one char and, or, andnot near, nearx (default 10 and directionless); with, withx (default 10 and in specified order Truncation and wildcarding seem to work only in the keyword pseudo-field
EEBO None keywords = all searchable fields * represents zero or more chars ? represents zero or one char and, or, not near, near.x (default 10 and directionless); fby, fby.x (default 10 and in specified order)  
Product Automagic Field bundling Truncation Wildcarding Boolean Proximity Comments
EAS None keyword = an unspecified collection of fields Same as for wildcarding ? represents one char; * represents zero or more chars and, or, andnot within x words of (forwards or backwards); within x words before and within x words after (providing directionality). [ ] lists alternatives, so c[aou]p will find cap, cop, or cup
LION None None * represents zero or more chars ? represents zero or one char and, or, not near near.x (default 10 and directionless); fby fby.x (default 10 and in specified order)  
OED CD-ROM None None Same as for wildcarding ? represents one char; * represents zero or more chars and, or, not selected from drop-down list near, not near, before, after, before or after and distance selected from drop-down list  
Product Automagic Field bundling Truncation Wildcarding Boolean Proximity Comments

 

Legend

WSB The World Shakespeare Bibliography
ESTC Online English Short Title Catalogue provided via the Research Libraries Group (RLG) Eureka interface
ESTC CD-ROM English Short Title Catalogue 1473-1800 on CD-ROM, 3rd edition
EEBO Early English Books Online
EAS Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare
LION Literature Online
OED Oxford English Dictionary CD-ROM Second Edition (version 3)
Automagic special tricks the search engine does without being asked
Field bundling provision of a single pseudo-field that can be searched instead of specifying a whole collection of fields linked by OR
Truncation wildcarding allowed in the terminal position only (so wom* hits woman, women, and womb)
Wildcarding wildcarding allowed in the medial or terminal positions (so w*m hits women, whom, whilom)
Boolean linking search criteria with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
Proximity specifying that two hits must occur with a given textual distance (so many words) of one another
char means an alphanumeric character (a-z, 0-9, and punctuation)