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Search Syntax | Searching for ASHA Articles | Special Searches | Statistical Weighting
To most effectively find information using the ASHA search engine, try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek.
Search Syntax
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Operator
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Action
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"term1 term2"
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Specifies that words should be adjacent
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+term
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Requires a term
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-term
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Excludes documents containing a term
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fieldname: term
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Specifies that the term must be found in that field (see Special Searches)
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Examples
Search by typing words and phrases.
speech perception children cochlear implants
ASHA’s search engine will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- the search engine returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.
Identify phrases with quotation marks.
“speech perception” children “cochlear implants”
A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other.
Use a require or reject operator (+,-).
+children +“cochlear implants”
You can require a word or phrase by entering a plus sign before it. The search engine will only return results that have all of your required terms. You can also exclude a word or phrase by entering a minus sign.
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Searching for ASHA Articles
If you know of a specific article that was published by ASHA, you may be able to find it on the ASHA Web site. Full-text articles from peer-reviewed journals are available to members only, while the abstracts are available to both members and non-members. ASHA Leader Online articles are also available to everyone.
Journal articles are currently available for the following years:
- American Journal of Audiology (AJA): 1991 - present
- American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (AJSLP): 1991 - present
- Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research (JSLHR): 1997 - present
- Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders (JSHD): 1980 - 1990
- Journal of Speech and Hearing Research (JSHR): 1980 - 1996
- Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools (LSHSS): 1980 - present
To locate journal articles without related Web site results, use journals.asha.org's advanced search feature.
ASHA Leader: 1999 - present
ASHA Magazine: articles are not available online
It is now possible to search by author. Just enter "author:" (without quotes) along with the author's first or last name. To search for the author's full name, use "author:{first name} author:{last name}." For example, to find articles about dysphagia by Jeri Logemann, enter "author:Jeri author:Logemann dysphagia."
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Special Searches
You can restrict searches to certain portions of web documents by using field syntax. This allows you to search for web pages' titles, urls, embedded hypertext links, etc. The field name should be in lower case, and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces after the colon and before the search terms.
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Name
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Description
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If no field is specified, the text is searched for in the title, description, body, URL, and keywords.
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link
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A hyperlink within the text of the document
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url
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The URL of the document
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title
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Title of the document
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keywords
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Keywords of the document assigned by ASHA staff
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Examples
link:{term}
Matches pages that contain at least one link to a page with a specific term in its URL. For example, +link:aphasia will return all of the pages that link to any page with “aphasia” in the URL.
url:{term}
Finds pages with a term anywhere in the page's URL. For example, +stuttering+url:journals matches only pages that contain the word “stuttering” in the text of the page and “journals” in the URL of the page.
title:{term}
If you are looking for a particular page for which you know a word or words in the title, use this field specifier to search for that word or phrase in the title of the page. For example, a search for +title:lexical results in pages with the word “lexical” in the title portion of the document.
keywords:{term}
Finds pages with a term entered as a keyword by ASHA staff. For example, +keywords:“continuing education” returns pages that we’ve specified are about the subject of continuing education.
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Statistical Weighting
A traditional search returns an unsorted list of all items that match the search condition. ASHA’s search engine goes considerably beyond this by using advanced statistical search technology to return the results sorted with the "best" matches listed at the top. Unlike plain searches, your query terms are automatically weighted, based on their statistical uniqueness. Common terms, such as “shall,” get a much lower weighting than less frequently occurring terms, such as the phrase “evidence-based practice.”
The search engine's advanced statistical weighting allows you to just type in relevant words and phrases, and the system will provide the answer to your query in the top few documents! Since there are cases in which it is convenient to narrow a query, you can use the + and - operators.
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