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Tip: The Help pages are context-sensitive so that, for example, if you were looking at a book's table of contents page and clicked the Help button, you would have been taken straight to the Help section about full-text content. You can, of course, go directly to another topic by using the Help menu in the left-hand navigation area.

 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about AMA Manual of Style Online

There are 2 main types of search available in AMA Manual of Style Online, Quick Search, where you type a word and Go, or Advanced Search, which gives you more options to construct complex queries and ways to refine your search. See Search Term Rules for a summary table of rules for using either.

Some common rules apply to both kinds of search.

Free Terms	The search will try to find exact matches for your search terms, but will also use a "stemming" algorithm to look for plurals and other forms: for example, "author" will find "authors" and "authorship" while "edit" will find "editor," "edited," "editing," "edition," etc.
Variant Forms	If you want to find results for a search term that is sometimes 1 word, sometimes 2, use this format: "Web site" Website This will find occurrences of both forms of the word.
Phrases	You can search for an exact phrase by enclosing it in double quotes, eg, "authorship criteria."
Case Sensitivity	AMA Manual of Style Online searches are not case-sensitive. A reference to "PubMed," for instance, would be found whether you typed "pub med," "PUB MED," or even "pUb MeD."
Wildcard	Use the wildcard symbol * to widen the scope of your search. This symbol stands for 0 or more characters. For more detail on how to use it, see Using wildcards in a Search.
Boolean Operators	AND, OR, NOT – see Boolean Search.
Stop Words	Common words ignored by the search engine – for more information see Stop Words.

The asterisk wildcard (*) is a catchall character that stands for any other character or combination of characters. It also stands for nothing, ie, there doesn't have to be anything in its place – ratio* will find ratio as well as rations, ratiocination, etc.
Using a wildcard * across all subjects in AMA Manual of Style Online, you may find that you get more results than you expected. For ways of dealing with this, see Large Numbers of Search Results, Refining Results, or Advanced Search.

On the Advanced Search pages, you can use a Boolean Search to be more specific about how the search engine should look for search words. Boolean Searches use the logical operators AND, NOT, and OR to determine how search terms are treated.
Placing AND between search terms means that both terms must appear somewhere in the entry text. Inserting NOT before a search term means that that term must not appear anywhere in the entry text. Using OR between search terms means that either or both of the terms can appear in the entry text.
For instance, a Boolean Search for
    zen AND metaphysics
is a narrow search that will find entries containing both the words zen and metaphysics, thus avoiding material on Zen Buddhism unrelated to metaphysics and material related to metaphysics that has nothing to do with zen.
A Boolean Search for
    zen OR metaphysics
is a wide search that will find entries containing either or both search terms. Note that this is the default for all searches, Quick and Advanced, unless otherwise specified.
A Boolean Search for
    zen AND NOT metaphysics
is a narrow search that will find entries containing the word zen, but will exclude any entries that contain the word metaphysics, even if they do mention zen.
You can combine any number of search terms and Boolean operators to build very specific searches, for instance     zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology) AND NOT axiology
Notice the use of parentheses ( ) to group search terms in this example. It is important to understand how parentheses affect the way search terms are treated: they have the same effect as parentheses in mathematical expressions. Consider the first part of the expression above:
    zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology)

This tells the search engine to find entries that

• contain the words zen and metaphysics
• contain the words zen and epistemology

You therefore ensure that the entries returned are related to both zen and (metaphysics or epistemology).

If on the other hand you ran a Boolean Search for zen AND metaphysics OR epistemology – without parentheses – your search would return entries that:

• contain the words zen and metaphysics
• contain the word epistemology

Excluding parentheses alters the nature of the search entirely, returning a long list of entries related to epistemology, many of which will have nothing to do with zen at all.

Returning to the full example above:
zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology) AND NOT axiology
 this search will find entries that:

• contain the words zen and metaphysics but not axiology
• contain the words zen and epistemology but not axiology

A very small number of words are not searched for by the AMA Manual of Style Online search engine because they are extremely common and would generate a huge number of results. These very common words are referred to as Stop Words; an example of such a stop word is "the." If you are using double quotes to search for an exact phrase and one of these stop words is included in the phrase, the word will be included because it is part of the phrase specified. However, if you searched for the string without quotes, the stop words would not be found. Characters such as exclamation marks, commas, and question marks are also ignored.

Stop Word List

a	f	k	p	u	z
b	g	l	q	v
c	h	m	r	w
d	i	n	s	x
e	j	o	t	y
and	by	it	such	these	with
are	for	no	that	they
as	if	not	the	this
at	in	of	their	to
be	into	on	then	was
but	is	or	there	will

The Quick Search tool is the easiest option to use: type 1 or more words into the input box and click Go, or press Return or Enter on your keyboard. By default, the Quick Search searches all of the text and section headers.

Note

• Quick Search assumes your search terms are connected by an implicit AND operator, so if you use more than 1 word, results will include matches for all of the words. If you want to see matches to any 1 or more of your search terms, use the OR operator (see Boolean Search) in Advanced Search.

If no exact matches are found, the search will look for close matches to those terms (plurals or past tenses of a verb, for example). Thus a search for "reviewed," for instance, would find "review." This ensures that you do not miss information because you chose a slightly different form of the word than that used in an entry.
See Search Results for information on interpreting the results of your search.
Advanced Search supports more complex searches: for example, you may search in 1 specified section or in a set of sections, and you may search only section headings.
Boolean Search permits still more complex search expressions, precisely tailored to your needs.

Use Advanced Search to refine your search when a Quick Search returns too many or too few results. To begin an Advanced Search, click on the Advanced Search link in the search box at any time.

Options include restricting your search to certain parts of the Manual, or restricting your search to section headings. You can combine any number of the fields and constraints. You can also construct more complex queries using the Boolean Search operators.
Note: In Advanced Search the engine assumes expressions to be matched in different fields are connected by an implicit AND. For example, if you enter
   "Editorial" in the Section Heading field
and
   "quality" and "review" in the Full-text field
you will only get results from sections with the word "Editorial" in the heading where also at least 1 of the other 2 terms appears in the full text (on the same page, if both are matched). If you want the looser constraint of 1 or more matches, you'll need to specify the OR operator in your search expression. In that case see Boolean Search.

Using the Advanced Search Controls

Section Heading Search Enter search expression to be matched in section headings specifically Full-Text Search Enter search expression to be matched in the body text of the Manual Choosing Sections Choose the Search All Chapters option button or set 1 or more checkboxes to confine the search to 1 or more of the sections only Index Search Insert the term you would like to search for in the Index Term box

The results of a search are tagged with a relevance ranking, weighted according to the number of matches for your search term in significant parts of the text. The default sort order of search results is based on this score.
In each set of search results, there are a number of links to the pages where hits have been found. Each row relates to a section of the book where a hit has been found.

Results Count
Immediately above the list of results, you will find a note that confirms the search terms and states the total number of results found.
Below this, and also at the bottom of the page, are links helping you to page through the search results. The legend next to these tells you which page you're on at the moment.

Section vs Screen Page in Results
For full-text searching, the unit of text is the section. For example, if your full-text search expression is
relative pronouns
you will only get results where both "relative" and "pronouns" are found in the same section. As more than 1 section is sometimes included in 1 on-screen page, there may be situations where both terms occur on the same screen page but are not found by an expression such as this because they are not in the same section.

Large Numbers of Search Results
When you have a large number of search results, only the first 100 hits (50 pages of results) found by the search engine will be shown.
When this happens, you should consider narrowing the focus of your search by using Advanced Search options.
It is unlikely that there will be more than 100 hits directly relevant to your query, and it is more efficient to refine your search and let the search engine take care of filtering out unwanted material.