This page explains how to make the most of the search engine on this site.

How The ROAPE Search Engine Works (skip this bit if you want)
Many search engines are based on 'boolean' logic which doesn't always work well in the fuzzy real world. The ROAPE site uses a 'weighting' score-based system which means that you can be quite 'sloppy' with your search query and still find what you want.

When you search on the ROAPE site, every item in the database is compared to see how close it 'matches' your query, and the best 50 are selected, and the best ten of these are displayed first. This closeness is calculated using a scoring system which awards points to each 'item' on the site.

Each keyword in the query produces a points score which is added to each item. When all keywords in your query have been processed, the items with highest scores are picked. Higher points are awarded for matching keywords at the start of your query than at the end; and higher points are awarded if the keyword is found in the title or author of an item than in the body text.

Hints for Getting Good Matches
Here are seven tips to improve the quality of your searches:

1. enter lots of keywords - the system is designed to be just as quick with ten keywords as it is with one - it will not slow down the search
   
   
2. try unlikely keywords - don't be afraid of putting in keywords that you think might not appear - if a keyword is not found it will not cause zero-match search to occur (this happens with other 'AND' logical search)
   
   
3. put most important words first - put the rarest or most relevant keywords first - this will bias the search into producing these first (this is not like 'OR' logical searches which weight all keywords equally)
   
   
4. use lowercase - character case is unimportant, so you can type 'mpla' or 'MPLA' and still find the same thing, so just hammer-in those keywords and ignore the 'SHIFT' key
   
   
5. use title words and names - if you think you know title keywords or the author name, put them in as these score more highly than keywords which only appear in the body
   
   
6. don't worry about spelling - if you can't spell a word, have a guess - the results page will have suggest alternative words which are definitely used elsewhere on the site
   
   
7. words like 'and', 'the', ... will be ignored - don't try to put in commonly occuring words as these are rejected as 'stop words' (it doesn't harm the search though) (see below) - good words to pick for searches are proper nouns like names (Mandela, Seko), places (Pretoria, Sahel) or organisations (ANC, Unita)

Word which Cannot be Searched for (or 'Stop Words')
Some keywords occur so frequently they are of no use in searching (eg. "Africa" appears in 99% of the entries on this site). Many databases will filter out these very common words - known as stop words - in order to make exhaustive yet efficient searches possible.

On this site, the following words are stop words, and are ignored in queries: a africa african an and are article as at be been between briefing but by class development economic for from has have in international is it its more national new no not of on one or people political review s social some south state that the their these this to was which with and world.

Rolling Improvements
Updating of the ROAPE database is an ongoing activity. Every month we are putting in better abstract texts, and adding more of the book titles from earlier books received lists, and adding new web sites and contributor biographies.

So, if you don't find a match today, try again in the future, or better still use the feedback form to tell us what it was that you couldn't find. Good searching!