Definition

• Nesting Operators enable you to decide which part of a search phrase is to be searched first before being combined with another part of the search phrase.
• This facilitates the creation of more complex searches for:
  • Improved accuracy (increased Precision) or targeting of the results of your search.
  • More comprehnsive or inclusive (increased Recall) results

Operators

• Parentheses ( ) are used as nesting operators in InfoTrac.

Usage

• Example: (cats or dogs) and disease?.
  • The word "disease" is being combined with, separately, "dogs" or "cats." Effectively, this is would be the same as a search "disease and dogs" plus the search "desease and cats." it will also turn up records with all three words in the documents.
• Note: The Infotrac Help Index says that you can not used a nested expression with a proximity operator. For example, the following is not supposed to work: "intellectual property" w3 (scotland or ireland). Try it, though.