Help for searching the database

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1. Search for Text:

The first field allows you to search for text in the three main fields - the headline of the article, the summary (usually the first paragraph) and the keywords from the whole article. The search engine will AND together the words you enter, if you enter two or more words only records which contain ALL those words will be selected. Searches are NOT case sensitive.

You will achieve more useful results if you narrow your search as much as possible by (a) being as specific as possible in the text field, entering several words accurately describing what you're looking for and (b) using the date field to restrict your search.

A number of acronyms are used fairly regularly: For example - heu for highly-enriched-uranium; dti - Department of Trade and Industry; bnfl - British Nuclear Fuels; ukaea - UK Atomic Energy Authority; aeat - AEA Technology; mp - Member of Parliament; msp - Member of Scottish Parliament; sepa - Scottish Environment Protection Agency; rwmac - Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee; comare - Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment; iaea - International Atomic energy Agency; nrpb - National Radiological Protection Board.

2. Source/Publication:

You need to link all words in a publication/newspaper title by using the hyphen (-) symbol. For example financial-times, sunday-times, caithness-courier. If this field is left empty records matching search criteria for all sources will be displayed.

3. Date:

This field is very useful in helping to narrow down searches and reduce the number of records displayed. ALL DATES ARE IN THE DD/MM/YYYY FORMAT, WITH FOUR DIGIT YEARS. If left empty all matching records will be returned up to the maximum chosen. For examples if you enter 10/03/1998 and 10/03/1998 only records for 10/03/1998 will be returned. Entering 01/03/1998 and 31/03/1998 will return records only for March 1998.

4. Max Hits:

The maximum number of records which can be returned from any search is 99, the default is 40. You can find more than 99 records through a series of searches and changing the date ranges. For example a first search for text using 01/01/1998 and 31/01/1998, then 01/02/1998 and 28/02/1998 etc.