Stop words are commonly used words such as articles, pronouns and prepositions. Stop words are not added to the search dictionary, since their relevance is minimal, but they are counted as words for proximity (the distance between words). Ignoring stop words allows EBSCOhost to retrieve a more precise Result List, especially for a relevancy ranked search.
EBSCOhost ignores stop words (such as the, for, of and after), finding any single word in its place. For example, if you entered company of America, EBSCOhost would find company of America, company in America, or company for America. It would not find company of the America, because the search engine retains a word distance.
If you enter two stop words, EBSCOhost will find any two words in the place of the stop words. For example, if you searched for company of the America, EBSCOhost finds any two words in the place of the stop words.
EBSCOhost has two primary lists of stop words, separate for Boolean and Natural Language searching. Additionally, several databases have their own list of stop words. All of these lists were created based upon The Library of Congress' suggestions on stop words, as well as our own statistical analysis.
Typically, when a phrase is enclosed by double quotations marks, the exact phrase is searched. This is not true of phrases containing stop words. A stop word will never be searched for in an EBSCOhost database, even if it is enclosed in double quotation marks. A search query with stop words only (i.e. no other terms) yields no results.
If you enter phrases with punctuation, EBSCOhost searches for the term both with and without the punctuation. For example, if you enter television: talk show, EBSCOhost finds results with television talk-show, television talk show, and if synonyms have been activated, TV talk show.
If you enter hyphenated words in a search, EBSCOhost automatically searches for the word in both hyphenated and non-hyphenated forms. For example, entering coca-cola will find both Coca Cola and Coca-Cola.