 Hello, this is Julie Brown, and I am a law librarianship intern with the Gallagher Law Library. The topic of this video is how to reduce your search results by getting your search terms closer together. Let's start by comparing three searches done on Westlaw for criminal contempt, limiting the jurisdiction to Washington State. The first search uses natural language and Westlaw searches for the terms criminal and contempt anywhere within the document. This basic search method returns 605 cases. That's a lot of cases to comb through. The second search uses the grammatical connector slash P to connect the two terms. This search is asking Westlaw to find only those cases where the two terms occur together within the same paragraph. Our search results are now reduced to 451 cases. The third search uses the numerical connector slash 5 to connect the two terms. This search is asking Westlaw to only find those cases where the two terms occur within five words of each other. Our results are now reduced to 205 cases. By using additional filters, such as court, practice area, and decision year, you could limit these results even further. Learning how and when to use terms and connectors is a great way to limit results by getting search terms that belong together closer together. If you were looking for cases about criminal contempt of court, looking up criminal contempt might get you too many results where those terms occur anywhere within the documents. You might pull up cases where it is mentioned that a plaintiff in a civil case has a criminal history, but that the contempt order the defense is asking for is denied. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the type of criminal contempt of court you are looking for. Making the connections between your search terms clear will help narrow the total number of results you get and hopefully make those results that's more relevant. There are two main ways to connect the terms, grammatically and numerically. Grammatical connections might be something like, I want to find the term criminal within the same sentence as contempt, or I want to find the term criminal within the same paragraph as contempt. Numerical connectors might include something like, I want to find the term criminal within three words of contempt, or I want to find the term criminal preceding the word contempt within three words. Available connectors differ slightly between Bloomberg, Lexus and Westlaw, but there are ways to find out how to use connectors on each platform. To find out which connectors are available in Bloomberg from the home screen, select the blue question mark to the right of the search box. A drop down box will appear. Within that box is a shortcut list of all the popular connectors including grammatical and numerical ones. You can also select the more link on the bottom right hand corner to get additional information and examples about using these connectors. To find out which connectors are available in Lexus from the home screen, select tips, which is located just above the search bar on the right hand side. Selecting tips will pull up a new window and if you scroll down a bit, you'll come to this area called search using segments and terms in connectors. For today we'll focus on using connectors. I've highlighted the most common connectors in Lexus, but there's a link at the bottom that will take you to a list of all the other available connectors. Below the link takes you to a list of available information about how connectors work and which connectors are available. I recommend that you look at this quick reference card because that's going to take you to all of the connectors available in Lexus. I also recommend reading this connector order and priority link here because that's going to give you some additional information about how Lexus orders connectors and how it determines the priority of those connectors. In the box below I highlighted the common connectors that are used in Lexus and then there's links to more information and examples there. Basically if you know how connectors work and which ones are available you'll be a far more efficient researcher which when you find yourself practicing law for real might lead to fewer late nights in the office finishing the research for those motions you might be writing for senior attorneys. To find out which connectors are available on Westlaw from the home screen select search tips just below the search bar and a new box will appear on your screen. On the left hand side of that box choose Boolean terms and connectors which will take you to a list of the connectors used in Westlaw. I've highlighted the common ones. As you can see from the examples in Bloomberg, Lexus and Westlaw, connectors operate similarly across all three platforms but there are a few minor differences. Library guides are often a great place to go for information about legal research databases. The Gallagher Law Library has a great guide comparing the connectors between Westlaw, Lexus and Bloomberg. You can see when searching for terms in the same sentence or in the same paragraph that Lexus and Westlaw basically operate the same way but Bloomberg is a little bit different. You have to put the P before the slash or the S before the slash. The Gallagher Law Library also has some great links to training videos for Westlaw, Lexus and Bloomberg. The Drake Law Library also has an excellent guide with a great chart on this topic with many different connectors and lots of examples all in one place. In the next few minutes we're going to run through a quick example of how using connectors will help you narrow your search result sets. For this example we're going to pretend we have been inspired to learn more about whether there are any cases dealing with the Endangered Species Act and the treatment of tigers held in captivity in the United States of America. Here we are at the Lexus Advance homepage. Let's start with a basic search for the phrase Endangered Species Act and then the terms captive and variations of it and the term tiger and variations of that because what we want to do is get the phrase Endangered Species Act to appear in the same document as word variations for captive and tiger. When you run the search you get 25 results and all of these cases here don't necessarily deal with the issues of the treatment of tigers in captivity. For example if you scroll down a bit you'll find the United States v. Clark case which doesn't seem to deal with the treatment of tigers rather it deals with the sale of a tiger skin rug. There are other cases like this that don't apply. Now while it wouldn't take too long to comb through all 25 of these cases why not make the process easier? Plus it's much simpler to see what is happening to your results if you experiment using connectors with this small result set. We're going to make one simple change to our search string and that is to add this slash five which means what we're looking for are documents that include the phrase Endangered Species Act along with variations of the word captive and variations of the word tiger that appear within five words of each other. When we run this search we get eight results and I can tell you after having scrolled through these about seven of them are directly relevant to what we're looking for. I highly recommend that you play around with a search string using different connectors to see how it affects your results. Thank you for watching this video on how to get your search terms closer together. As a reminder you can find additional videos and resources at the Gallagher Law Library website which is lib.law.udub.edu. Thank you.