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College of the Atlantic - Thorndike Library

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OneSearch

What is OneSearch?

OneSearch is a quick and easy way to search many of our library resources all at one time, including our library databases, our catalog (Thorncat), and some open-source content.  It can be an excellent way to start your research, and it has the advantage of searching many resources you might not consider searching otherwise.  It retrieves journal articles, conference papers, news, images, movies, and more.

 

OneSearch isn't an exact replacement for searching our databases directly.  The citations in some of our databases are not included in OneSearch and some of the databases may have incomplete coverage.  Since updates to OneSearch occur twice per week the results may not have the latest information found by searching a library database directly.

 

OneSearch is the name we’ve given this product called Summon which is produced by the company Proquest.

Search Tips

Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT)
  • By default, all search terms are combined with the AND operator.
  • When using AND, OR, NOT they must be capitalized.
  • To expand your results, use the OR operator.  For example, microcircuits OR nanocircuits will return results with either word.
  • To exclude items, use the NOT operator before a term.  For example, the search animal NOT dog will return results that do not include the term dog.
Wildcards (* and ?)
  • The question mark (?) can be used to represent a single but varying letter.  For example, b?ll will find ball, bell, and bill.
  • The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. A search for ch*ter would find charter, character, and chapter. When used at the end of a word, such as temp*, the results would include temptation, temple and temporary
  • Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.
Phrase Searching
  • Enclose words you want searched as a phrase with quotation marks.  Example:  "climate change" or "College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor"
  • OneSearch will not recognize wildcards used in a phrase.
Proximity Searching
  • When you want to search for words near each other but not necessarily next ot each other in a phrase, then conduct proximity searching by using quotes and a tilde.  Example:  "earthquake fault"~10 will find results with a maximum of 10 words between earthquake and fault.  Word order does not matter.
Author Searching
  • When entering an author's name, you can enter the name with either the first or last name first.  The results will include either form of the name.