New HeinOnline Proximity Search Option

This article is republished with permission by W.S. Hein. View the original article here.

HeinOnline takes user feedback very seriously. Whenever possible, we implement suggestions we receive. Recently, HeinOnline user @legalkm tweeted about proximity searching:

We immediately looked into whether we could add “w/#” search syntax for proximity searching to HeinOnline’s capabilities, because we don’t like to see sad faces in the same tweet as a reference to HeinOnline. Great news: we did it!

For example, let’s search in the Law Journal Library for the word ‘jury’ within five words of ‘discrimination’:

1. jury w/5 discrimination

2. “jury discrimination”~5

Both search queries produce the same set of search results, as depicted below.

This change makes searching in HeinOnline even more user-friendly. Researchers who may be familiar with other databases’ search syntax for term proximity are now able to seamlessly change between interfaces.