Wildcard Operators tell Verity that the search words contain wildcards that it should consider when looking for what you seek.

An asterisk (*) stands for any number of characters. A search for Ro* would find Robert, Rome, and Rodriguez.

A search for apostol* would find the same word in various languages, ie: apostolate, apostolat, apostolado, apostolato. If you only type apostolate you will just get results in English.

A question mark (?) stands for a single character. It is more limited, and hence less useful in one way than the asterisk. A search for ?ar?et would find both carpet and target, but not learget.

Curly brackets-- {} -- enable you to specify a number of possible word fragments, separated by commas. A search for {edu,voca}tion returns both education and vocation.

Use concept operators to specify more than one search word or search element. The concept operator tells Verity whether you mean that all the search words or elements must be present in the document for it to count as a match, or if any word or element makes the document count as a match. The concept operators include AND and OR.

The AND operator indicates that all the search words or elements must be present in a document to make it count as a match: Jesuits AND retreats AND directed. You can also write this same thing in the following way to get identical results: AND (Jesuits,retreats,directed)

The OR operator indicates that a document countas as a match if any of the search words or elements are present in it: Jesuits OR retreats OR directed. You could also write: OR (Jesuits,retreats,directed)

Verity's proximity operators specify how close together search words must be within a document for it to count as a match. Documents in which the search words occur only at the beginning and end probably have less interest than documents where they occur in the same paragraph, for instance. The proximity operators include NEAR, NEAR/N, PARAGRAPH, and SENTENCE.

The NEAR operator specifies that you are most interested inthose documents in which the search words are closest together. If we just wrote Kolvenbach,spirituality, we would get 422 documents. However, if we narrowed the search by writing, Kolvenbach <NEAR> spirituality, we would get 55 documents. Using the NEAR operator allows you to narrow your search considerably. The NEAR/N operator allows you to specify how close toegether the words must be to qualify as a match. 'Near' is actually shorthand for 'Near/1000'. If you wrote Kolvenbach <Near/10> Spirituality, you would get three documents.

The PARAGRAPH and SENTENCE operators specify that the words need to be in the same paragraph or sentence, respectively. Sometimes these work better than NEAR because you know that the words are related in some way having to do with their actual linguistic contexts, rather than their proximity in the text.

Relational operators enable you to search for words within specific fields, in this case, the Title of the document. You can use them in the special search form to the left. Relational operators include the following: CONTAINS, MATCHES, STARTS, ENDS, SUBSTRING.
The CONTAINS operator finds documents in which a specific field contains the exact word(s) you specify. If you specify more than one word, the words must appear in the correct order for the document to be considered a match.
The MATCHES operator finds documents in which the entirety of a specific field is exactly what you specify; this operator looks at the field as a whole, not as individual words.
The STARTS operator finds documents in which a specific field starts with the characters you specify. The ENDS operator finds documents in which a specific field ends with the characters you specify.
The SUBSTRING operator finds documents in which a specific field contains any portion of what you specify. Unlike CONTAINS, this operator matches incomplete words.