Search Help - American Marketing Association

	Search Tips for MarketingPower.com

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Keywords | Boolean | Natural Language

To increase the precision of your search results, the AMA search requires most, but not necessarily all, of the words in your search to be present in the results. To gain more control over your results, read through the following hints.

Keywords
With our search you can search on simple words. The more words you enter, the more on-target your results will be. Examples:

marketing research
(instead of marketing )
collegiate events
(instead of events)

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Boolean
The AMA search supports full Boolean capability (AND, OR, NOT), including parenthetical expressions. There is no limit to the level of nesting which you can use in a search query.

Use double quotes around specific phrases to search on occurrences of the actual phrase. Examples:

software for "marketing research "
"AMA webcast "

Searches in single quotes will return the same results as searches that are not quoted.

If Boolean operators appear in a quoted phrase, they may not be interpreted as a Boolean operator but as part of the search term. For example:

"Marketing AND Internet "
will return documents with the phrase "Marketing and Internet " whereas
Marketing AND Internet
will return documents that contain the word Marketing and the word Internet.

Use OR to retrieve documents that include any of the search words (rather than most.) Example:

webcast OR blog

Use NOT to indicate a word that must not appear in the documents. Example:

branding NOT marketing research

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In addition to AND and NOT, you may use a + (plus) to indicate words that must be present in the documents and a - (minus) for those that must not be present.

You must include a space between the + and - symbols and the terms which immediately precede them, but not between the symbols and the terms that follow them. Examples:

+branding -events
+branding +management +CEO -webcast

The AMA search supports two truncation symbols (wildcards) in queries. You must have at least four non-wildcard characters in a word before you introduce a wildcard. The * (asterisk) can be used to replace multiple characters. The % (percent) symbol is used to replace only one character. Please note that the AMA search automatically stems most common plural and singular forms of words (a search on "marketer" will also return results containing the word "marketers", and a search on "marketers" will return results containing the word "marketer".) Examples:

market*
will find results containing words that begin with "market" (e.g. marketing, marketer, marketed)
psych*ist
will find all results which contain words that begin and end with "psych" and "ist" (e.g. psychologist, psychiatrist)
gene%logy
will return documents containing words beginning with "gene" and ending with "logy", separated by a single letter (e.g. genealogy and geneology).

Wildcards are useful when searching for commonly misspelled words

You can also use multiple truncation symbols within a single word. Expanded words found by using truncation symbols will not affect the relevancy ranking of those documents, so you may want to use additional related terms in your query to ensure that your results are accurate and meaningful.

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Natural Language
The AMA search supports natural language searching. To find information on your topic of interest, try typing a question into the search bar. Example:

What is the best way to do internet marketing?

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