Welcome to the Religion and Philosophy Collection Database Information Screen! Browse the topics listed below to find what you are looking for:

• [About the Database]
• [Searching Tips]
• [Searchable Fields]
• [Definition of Fields]
• [Copyright and Restrictions of Use]
• [Where to Send Your Comments]

About the Database

Religion and Philosophy Collection

The Religion & Philosophy Collection™ is a comprehensive database covering such topics as world religions, major denominations, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy and the history of philosophy.

With more than 300 full text journals and unparalleled coverage of the subject areas listed above, the Religion & Philosophy Collection is an essential tool for researchers and students of theology and philosophical studies.

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Searching Tips

There are a number of helpful tips and hints you can use to improve your search results. For example, you can use Boolean operators to link search terms together; and/or limit the search to a specific title.

Sometimes a search can be overly general (results equal too many hits) or overly specific (results equal too few hits). To fine tune your search, you can use AND, OR, and NOT operators to link your search words together. These operators will help you narrow or broaden your search to better express the terms you are looking for and to retrieve the exact information you need quickly.

USING THE "AND" OPERATOR: If you have a search term that is too general, you can append several terms together using "AND". By stringing key terms together, you can further define your search and reduce the number of results. Note: Unless you define a specific search field, the result list will contain references where all your search terms are located in either the citation, full display or full text.

• For example, type sleep AND walking to find results that refer to both sleep and walking.

USING THE "OR" OPERATOR: In order to broaden a search, you can link terms together by using the "OR" operator. By using "OR" to link your terms together you can find documents on many topics. Linked by this operator, your words are searched simultaneously and independently of each other.

• As an example, search sleep AND walking OR waking to find results that reference the terms "sleep" and "walking", or the term "waking".

USING THE "NOT" OPERATOR: In order to narrow a search, you can link words together by using the "NOT" operator. This operator will help you to filter out specific topics you do not wish included as part of your search.

• Type: sleep OR walking NOT waking to find results that contain the terms "sleep" or "walking" but not the term "waking".
• To further define your results, type: sleep AND walking AND waking to constrict the search to include all terms linked by the "AND" operator.

Parentheses also may be used to control a search query. Without parentheses, a search is executed from left to right. Words that you enclose in parentheses are searched first. Why is this important? Parentheses allow you to control and define the way the search will be executed. The left phrase in parentheses is searched first; then based upon those results the second phrase in parentheses is searched.

Generalized Search:
dog or cat and show or parade

Focused Search:
(dog or cat) and (show or parade)

In the first example, the search will retrieve everything on dog or cat shows AS WELL AS everything on parades whether or not the articles refer to dogs or cats.

In the second example, we have used the parentheses to control our query to only find articles about shows or parades that reference dogs or cats.

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Searchable Fields

The default fields for unqualified searches consist of the following: all authors, all subjects, all keywords, all title info (including source title) and all abstracts.

The following list will help you locate detailed information referenced in this database as a field.

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Definition of Fields

The following table explains the contents of each field in a Religion and Philosophy Collection record's detailed display.

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Copyright and Restrictions of Use

The Religion and Philosophy Collection database is made up of indexing, abstracts, and full text. The copyright of the abstracts and indexing is owned by EBSCO Publishing. This database is intended solely for the use of the individual patron of the licensing party.

Copyright of the full text is the property of the publisher of the original publication. Text may not be copied without express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used to access it. This text is intended solely for the use of the individual user.

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Where to Send Your Comments

If you have some comments about either the database or the software, we would appreciate hearing from you! Please mail your comments to:

Please Submit any questions you have to: http://support.epnet.com.

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