HathiTrust: Search tips

Catalog Search:​ Search bibliographic fields such as Title, Author, Publication Date.

Full-text Search: ​Use keywords to search all the words in all the works in HathiTrust.

Collection Builder:​ Search inside a collection of materials that you or others have created.

Single-volume Search:​ When viewing a work in the page-viewing application, use keywords to search inside that volume alone.

Phrase Searching:​ Use quotes to search for an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction".

Wildcards: ​Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum;wom?n will find woman and women.

Boolean Searching:​ Use AND and OR (capitalized) between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find works about heart surgery or cardiac surgery

• Find many of the texts you need in HathiTrust’s digital library of 17 million books, journals, and publications, then create a collection of these items for future reference or to share with others.
• Perform full-text (keyword or phrase) searches across the entire corpus or within a selection of items.Use full-text searches to discover what you’re looking for or to identify items for interlibrary loan or research bibliography.
• Distinguish primary source or peer-reviewed items with greater ease as HathiTrust metadata are more nuanced and consistently applied than in other digital repositories such as Internet Archive or GoogleBooks.
• View or download citations for any item in the collection in MLA or APA format.
• Use faceted searching, metadata tools, or HathiTrust Research Center services to perform complex analyses, data mining research, and other digital humanities activities.