PROXIMITY
It is often important to specify how far apart the words in relevant records should be, particularly when searching the full text of a resource. The simplest form of proximity searching is to surround the words of a phrase in quotation marks. This gets around the implicit AND convention referred to in section 1. Thus, in most databases, searching for
“money market”
will retrieve records containing that phrase only. Leaving the quotation marks off in most databases will retrieve every record containing the words “money” and “market,” but not necessarily next to one another.
Unfortunately, there is little uniformity in the syntax of proximity operators for anything beyond a simple phrase. Below are examples for some key databases of searches for “asteroid” and “earth” within 15 words of one another
Proquest: asteroid N/15 earth
Lexis-Nexis: asteroid W/15 earth
JSTOR: “asteroid earth”~15
EbscoHost: asteroid N15 earth
Google: asteroid AROUND(15) earth
A more comprehensive list is available on a Butler Blog post, but rather than memorizing a whole list of conventions, you may just want to ask your a librarian about the syntax for the database you are using.