| Operator | Example | Description |
| radiation safety | Two or more words with no operator between them searches for documents containing the words immediately adjacent to each other. | |
| { } | {high-voltage} | Curly brackets ignore special words and characters when performing searches. A list of reserved words is located at the end of this table. |
| and | safety and radiation and construction | The AND operator searches for documents containing all words. |
| & | same as and | |
| or | alara or exposure | The OR operator searches for documents containing any words. |
| | | same as or | |
| not | safety not construction | The NOT operator searches for documents containing safety but not construction |
| ~ | same as not | |
| ; | safety; radiation | The NEAR (semi-colon) operator returns higher scores for terms closer together and lower scores for terms farther apart in a document. |
| , | safety, radiation, construction | The ACCUMULATE (comma) operator searches for documents that contain at least one occurrence of any of the query terms. The documents that contain the most occurrences of the highest number of query terms are assigned the highest score |
| ( ) | (Fermi OR Fermilab) AND radiation | Precedence. Documents containing Fermi or Fermilab are found first then joined to those also containing radiation |
| = | Fermi=Fermilab | The EQUIVALENCE (equal) operator makes two or more terms equivalent during the search. Useful when used with the AND operator. For example: Fermi=Fermilab AND radiation. This is the same query as: (Fermi OR Fermilab) AND radiation |
| ! | !smythe | The SOUNDEX operator expands a search to include all terms that sound the same as the specified term. Note: The "!" character must immediately precede the term. |
| $ | $work | The STEM operator expands a search to include all terms having the same stem or root word as the specified term. This example would return documents containing the words: work, works, worker, working, etc. Also, this function can identify different forms of a word, for example: $sing would return sing, sang, sung, etc. |
| Reserved Words & Special Characters | - ! $ % & ( ) * , ; ? [ ] \ _ { } | ~ > ABOUT ACCUM AND BT BTG BTI BTP MINUS NEAR NOT NT NTG NTI NTP OR PT RT SQE SYN TR TRSYN TT WITHIN | |