Finding Words Related to Your Query


You can use the Relate Advisor to identify potentially valuable query words that might not have originally occurred to you. In the feedback searching process, this advisor can suggest terms with which you can refine your query.

After entering a query, you can activate the Relate Advisor by clicking its radio button and clicking the Get Results button. The advisor then generates, on-the-fly, a list of words in the current database that are statistically related to the words in your query. Words are considered related if they exhibit a significant degree of co-occurrence within records.

The Relate Screen displays the most significant related terms, ordered by degree of co-occurrence with your query words. If a word in the list occurs in more than one active database, the number of parent databases is displayed parenthetically.

Feedback Searching with the Relate Advisor

The Relate Screen displays words that might not be immediately obvious to you, but could nonetheless be useful in a query. This advisor's feedback can aid you in refining a query by suggesting valuable search terms that you otherwise might not consider.

You can include any Relate Screen entry in your query by clicking it and then clicking the Add Terms to Query button. You can select multiple words for inclusion by control-clicking them (command-clicking for Macintosh clients).

After clicking the Add Terms to Query button, you will see your selection(s) appended to your current query.

[Previous Topic] [Contents] [Next Topic]