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Library Terms Glossary

- F -

Field - In a database, records are divided up into separate parts, called Fields. A field in a database record tells you one kind of information, such as the author's name or the journal name or the subject of the article. In most databases you can fine-tune your search by instructing the database to search for information by looking in a particular field. Most fields are abbreviated. For example, you can do a search for "glaciers" in the journal "Natural History" in some databases by typing in the search "glaciers and jn=natural History".

Field Limiting - Requiring that a keyword or phrase appear in a specific field of documents retrieved. Most often used to limit to the "Title" field in order to find documents primarily about one or more keywords.

Full text - Full text indicates that a particular database provides the entire textual content of an article or document.  Some databases provide only citations or abstracts, while others provide the full text.

Fuzzy "AND" - When results are ranked in a database (most usually occurs with web search engines), documents with any terms (Boolean OR) are retrieved, but documents with all terms (Boolean AND) are ranked first on the list.

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