New England Fact Sheet Finder Instructions

New England
Pest management
Fact Sheet Finder Intro

Instructions:
The Fact Sheet Finder provides a simple, quick way to search by keyword through a list of over 1,100 pest fact sheets posted on New England university and state agency websites. A separate, more extensive database of IPM resources from throughout the Northeast is also available.

To search for a New England pest fact sheet, enter a word or phrase in the top box. Only fact sheets that contain the word or exact phrase will be returned. For best results, start with a single word in the first box only. If that generates too many fact sheet titles, then you can limit the search by using the other boxes or by using a phrase instead of a single word.

     To narrow the search, enter a word or phrase in the second box. Only fact sheets that contain the words in both box 1 AND box 2 will be returned. To narrow the search further, enter a word or phrase in the third box.

     Then press the blue "Find Fact Sheets" button.

Look for: Keyword 1 required ->
AND Keyword 2 (optional)
AND Keyword 3 (optional)

Details:
The Fact Sheet Finder form on this page looks through the entire text of each publication in the database of New England pest management fact sheets to find those that contain the keywords you specify. There are currently over 1,100 fact sheets in the collection.

The Fact Sheet Finder is separate from, and works differently than, the PRO website search box that appears in the top border of each PRO New England page. The PRO search box finds pages on the PRO web site that contain the keywords you specify, and ranks them by relevance. But it does not search inside the fact sheet database.

The simplest way to use this form is to enter only one keyword per box. You can use the second or third keyword boxes to narrow the search. A fact sheet must contain ALL of the keywords specified to be included in the results. For keywords, you can use any word that you think will appear in the fact sheets you wish to find - pest name (common or scientific), author, state name etc. The search engine looks at the entire contents of every fact sheet in the database. Portions of words that match your terms are also counted as matches. For example, if you enter the word 'organic', fact sheets with the word 'organically' are considered a match. There is no ranking for relevance, and the returned results are listed alphabetically by state and title.

Using more specific search words, or forms of words, will give more focused results. For example, if you are interested in tarnished plant bug and searched with the word 'plant' you will get a large number of matches, but most of them will be about plants, not plant bugs. But if you search on the word 'tarnished' you will get a shorter list of matching fact sheets, most of which will be about tarnished plant bug since the word 'tarnished' isn't commonly used.

If you enter more than one word in a box, only those fact sheets that have those words in that exact order will be considered matches. For example, if you are interested in organic weed control and enter the words 'organic weed' (without the quotes) in the first box, then only those fact sheets that have the word organic followed by the word weed will be included in the results. A fact sheet with the text "controlling weeds organically" would not necessarily be included in the search results because those words are not an exact match of 'organic weed'.