Oregon Legal Research Blog
While playing around with our newly installed OSB BarBooks database and came across this mysterious Boolean search: variable: 4 and weights:7
While waiting for the answer to reveal itself, I went off to catch up with my law library blogs and ran across this excellent research tip post at the KCCLL (King County Law Library) Klues blog:
“Cheat sheet” comparing Lexis and Westlaw search syntax Research Tips
It links to:
LexisNexis and Westlaw Features Compared, from the Cleveland-Marshall School of Law Library.
[That “variable” search means:
“When site search sorts search results after a search, by default all words in a request count equally in counting hits. However, you can change this by specifying the relative weights for each term in your search request, like this:
apple:5 and pear:1
This request would retrieve the same documents as apple and pear but, site search would weight apple five times as heavily as pear when sorting the results.
In a natural language search, site search automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution in your documents. If you provide specific term weights in a natural language search, these weights will override the weights site search would otherwise assign.”]