Boolean Operators
JustCite supports all the usual Boolean operators includingAND
, OR
and NOT
.
AND
Both words must appear at least once in the fields requested. The searchdisclosure AND document
will return a result containing:
The court ordered the disclosure of the document.
Note that theAND
operator will always be implied unless:
- the terms are enclosed in double quotation marks, or;
- the
OR
orNOT
operators are specified explicitly instead.
corporation tax
will return the same results as corporation AND tax
, whereas "corporation tax"
will return only those results containing that precise phrase.
TIP: For the avoidance of doubt, it should be said that this behaviour in treating the AND
as implied corresponds to that of Justis and Westlaw, but is the direct opposite of how Lexis Library behaves.
OR
At least one of the words either side must be present in the document, but not necessarily both. The searchhomicide OR murder
will return both
- The Homicide Act has been amended.
- The sentence for murder has been extended.
TIP: The OR
operator is especially useful when searching by subject keyword as it enables you to broaden your search to encompass multiple synonyms or near-synonyms.
NOT
Any document containing the subsequent word is removed from the search results. The searchjudicial review NOT criminal
would exclude a document containing the phrase:
This is an application for judicial review in the context of a criminal appeal.
TheNOT
operator is very powerful, be careful you do not accidentally exclude useful results.
TIP: The search operators are not case sensitive: Both OR
and or
produce the same result.
Proximity Operators
JustCite allows you to search for terms that appear within a certain distance from one another. JustCite supports the standardw/x
syntax, as well as the long form within x of
.
The search injunction w/5 interim
would return the following keywords:
Civil Procedure, Interim Injunction
The search would not return the following:Injunction, Family Law, Failure to comply with Order, Interim Payments
TIP: We have predefined the word near
as a shorthand for within 10 of
. You can also specify a word sequence within the proximity range using the form w/x before
or w/x after
.
AND
search are somewhat limited.
Wildcard Operators
JustCite supports the following wildcard operators:- Asterisk (*) – stem search to check different correct word endings
child*
would return the results child, children, childish - Question Mark (?) – character substitution – searching for a single unknown character
wom?n
would return woman or women - Tilde (~) – fuzzy/”near match” search which allows for spelling mistakes.
smith~
would return smith, smithe, smyth, smits - Hyphen (-) – matches hyphenated and unhyphenated forms of the search term
life-boat
will match “life-boat”, “life boat” and “lifeboat”.
NOTE: If no results are returned on a literal search, a fuzzy search will be carried out automatically and the permutation with the most numerous results selected. Therefore, it is only necessary to use the fuzzy search operator explicitly when you want to match multiple variations within a single set of results.
Year Range Operators
There are two differing syntaxes for using year range operators, depending on whether you are using the general Search or the Advanced Search. In the general search, you must use the field restrictorYear [ date search string ]
. For example:
Year [before 1932]
Year [from 1995 to 2005]
Year [after 2001]
Year [ ]
and simply enter the operators directly in the date search boxes. For example:
before 1932
from 1995 to 2005
Nesting Operators
JustCite supports the use of parentheses to “nest” your search terms and operators, thereby forcing JustCite to process them in a certain order. Consider the following search:"Anton Piller" or search and order or injunction
JustCite will return results containing any of the following:
- The phrase
"Anton Piller"
- The two terms
search
andorder
- The word
injunction
("Anton Piller" or search) and (order or injunction)
This time JustCite will return results containing:
- Either the phrase
"Anton Piller"
or the wordsearch
; and - Either the word
order
or the wordinjunction
.