Latin America Data Base University of New Mexico University of New Mexico


Our search engine is MySQL. Here are some tips to help you with your search.

Word Search

It is possible to search the headlines of all the articles, the entire text of all the articles, or both the headlines and the text. The default selection is both headlines and text.

Use quotation marks, a quoted string, to search for words only when they are together. For example, "Human Rights" will search the records for these words together, and not all instances of "Human" and "Rights."

You may enter strings of words in the text boxes. You can join your words by connectors "and," "or," and "not." The word 'and' is optional. Entering A and B or C will have the same effect as entering A B or C.

Examples of AND, OR, and NOT

The search engine is case-insensitive, so you can use either upper or lower case letters.

Note: It is not possible to search for the following characters:

  • & (ampersand)
  • | (pipe)
  • ( (left parenthesis)
  • ) (right parenthesis)
  • " (quote)
Dates
Use the date boxes to narrow your search. For example, if you are searching for articles on a news incident that occurred in 1992, enter 1992-01-01 in the "After Date" box and 1993-01-01 in the "Before Date" box. If you know the date of the article, use the Exact Date box. Remember, LADB's bulletins each come out once per week, and the writers usually wait on breaking news until they have compiled a complete story. So an article on an incident probably is not published on the date of the incident itself.

Many LADB articles refer to previous articles written for LADB bulletins. You can find these articles more quickly by using the select box for the publication title combined with filling out the "Exact Date" field.

Publications
Use the check boxes to limit your search to one or several publications. If no box is selected, LADB searches all the publications in the archive. (See our publications page for descriptions of LADB's titles.)

After you have filled out your search form click on the gray button "Search" and wait for your results page.

Spanish Characters (á, é, í, ñ, ó, and ú)

Archive Search

All of the Archive articles are in English. If you enter Spanish characters in the Archive search form, they will be converted to English characters by removing the accent or tilde.

Economies of Latin America Archive Search

Most of the Econ articles are in Spanish. If you are searching for a Spanish word in the Econ articles, you need to use the Spanish spelling, including the accent marks and/or tildes on the letters.

For instance, if you search for Mexico instead of México you should only expect to find the articles which are in English.

If your keyboard is already set up so you can type Spanish character then you can simply type what you want.

Another method is to enter the HTML equivelent and let the search engine convert the letters for you. While this is cumbersome, it should work correctly on all browsers. The HTML equivelents each start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). Both of these character are important. If either of them is missing, the conversion will not occur.

HTMLLetterASCII ValueHTMLLetterASCII Value
ÁÁ193áá225
ÉÉ201éé233
ÍÍ205íí237
ÑÑ209ññ241
ÓÓ211óó243
ÚÚ218úú250

If you enter México, the search engine will convert it, and search for México.

"Quoted strings"

If you enter a quoted string then the search engine will look for the exact text contained in the quoted string (once it has done any conversion from HTML equivalents to Spanish characters).

This makes it possible to search for a phrase instead of simple searching for any article which contains all of the words you entered.

AND, OR and NOT

Examples of AND, OR, and NOT

In spoken language, the precedence of 'and', 'or' and 'not' is usually determined by context, inflection and common sense. There isn't much context in a collection of search word, the inflection is lost when something is typed, and common sense is difficult to program.

So we need some other way to determine what you mean when you use 'and', 'or' and 'not'.

One method is to use a lot of parenthesis. The search form supports parenthesis, but it would be awkward if every search had to be fully parenthesized.

We have decide to give 'and' a higher precedence in order to better match what we believe to be the more common meaning of the spoken language. We know that this is subjective, but a choice had to be made.

The result is that if you enter A and B or C, we assume you mean I want to get both A and B, or I want to get C., instead of I want to get A and either B or C. If you really want A and either B or C you should enter either A and B or A and C or A and (B or C).

Implicit AND

The word 'and' is optional. Entering A and B or C will have the same effect as entering A B or C.

Synonyms

"&" is a synonym for "AND". "|" is a synonym for "OR". "!" is a synonym for "NOT".

Date Formats

By now you've probably already heard more than you wanted to about Y2K and four digit years. If, for some reason, you want more details, look here.

MySQL uses the YEAR-MO-DA format. This is the preferred date format for this search interface.

These old date formats are also supported, but their use is depreciated.
Old formatExampleNew format
YR941994-01-01
YEAR19941994-01-01
MO/YR5/941994-05-01
MO/DA/YR5/23/941994-05-23
MO/DA/YEAR5/23/19941994-05-23

Retrieving Your Results

Your search results appear on a page listing the headlines of the articles found. The default order is by date and by number of times your search criteria appeared in the article and/or headline.

Click on the headline to read the articles. If your institution has not registered with LADB for IP recognition you will be prompted for your user name and password the first time you click on a headline. You must be a subscriber or trial user to have a user name and password. (Click on Subscription Information button above to subscribe.

To select and retrieve articles, mark the box next to the articles you wish to retrieve. When you click on the "Fetch documents" button all the articles selected will be retrieved into one file for downloading or printing or sending to an email address.

To save a document to a floppy disk or your hard drive open the article you want to save on the results page. Go to the "File" section of your browser toolbar (e.g. Netscape has "File" on the top left of the browser window) and click on "Save As." You will be prompted for a file name and file type. You can save the file as an HTML file (that will be the type automatically selected) but remember that to read it you will have to open it with your browser (e.g. Netscape). OR, you can opt to save the article as a text file. Then you can read it with any software that can read ASCII. Enter a file name. Pick where you want to save it (your C drive, or your floppy disk drive).

You can mail your search results to your e-mail address. Click on the File section of your browser toolbar. Click on "Send page" or "Mail document." Enter your e-mail address. Hit send.

Citation

LADB's bulletins are copyrighted. We can be quoted or referred to without permission for standard academic and research work. For a guide to scholarly citation of electronic resources go to the Columbia University Press guide to on-line style. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html