PAIS International (Public Affairs Information Service) provides citations and abstracts about public policy and social issues on a global scale. The Public Affairs Information Service International provides bibliographic access to articles, books, hearings, reports, government publications, web resources, and other publications from 120 countries. PAIS includes English language abstracts and subject headings for materials in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Updated monthly and covering public affairs information since 1972, PAIS International contains about a million records, each with complete bibliographic information, and a brief abstract .

PAIS International is available to current UT Arlington Faculty, and UT Arlington Students on the web at this addresses:

http://eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/fs-pais.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in PAIS International to add plurals is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a root word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings of that word. For example, the command "homeless*" will have the computer search engine look for either or both "homeless" or "homelessness."

A phrase is indicated with quotation marks ("") so that words that are surrounded by quotation marks are searched as a single string. For example, "social work" will be searched as a two word phrase.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR . Here is an example:

(homeless* and runaway*) AND (policy or policies or "social work*")

The first part of this statement will find material about homelessness and children who are runaways. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies" or the phrases "social work" or "social worker" or "social workers". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for policies and social work responses to the social problem of homelessness.

John Dillard, Science and Social Sciences Librarian
dillard@uta.edu
cell: (817) 675-8962 -- office: (817) 272-7518