Help using the search tool on USP's Web site

USP's Web site uses search technology which honors boolean queries. You may use the following specifications to narrow your search results:

and
and finds documents containing instances of two or more words. If you enter multiple words without a conjunction, and is assumed.
example: veterinary and medicine
or
or finds documents containing instances of at least one of two terms in a document.
example: verified or dietary
not
not finds documents containing one or more words and not another. The example below returns documents containing 'standards' as long as they don't contain 'reference'.
example: standards not reference
()
( ) finds instances of the expression in the parentheses first and then the rest of the expression in the document. The example below returns documents where either 'education' or 'workshop' (or both) are found if 'professional' is found as well.
example: professional and (education or workshop)
*
To truncate a word, use an asterisk (*) at the end. For example, the search "pharm*" would retrieve documents that have the words "pharmacy", "pharmacist", "pharmaceutical", etc.

If a boolean operator is not specified, the search tool assumes "and" for every search term. The operators are case sensitive -- use lowercase for the most inclusive results. When searching multiple keywords together, place the most relevant or important keywords first.

If you are still unable to find the information you are searching for:

  • Check the spelling of your keywords
  • Try different keywords
    • if no results were found, make your keywords more general
    • if too many results were found, make your keywords more specific
  • Visit our sitemap to find related information.
  • the webmaster.