Newspapers and Gazettes advanced search

Use Advanced Search to improve your results when searching the Newspapers and Gazettes category.

Note: The Newspapers and Gazettes category only includes digitised versions. For physical copies, use Books and Libraries advanced search.

Check out Related Pages for more information.


Advanced searching Newspapers and Gazettes

1. In the Search box at the top of the Trove homepage, enter a keyword for what you want to search. Ensure that the keyword is spelled correctly – Trove will search exactly what is entered. 

2. Select Newspapers & Gazettes from the Advanced Search drop-down menu underneath the green magnifying glass button. Trove will generate filter options, followed by a list of search results containing your keyword.

3. Add or change keyword/s in the filter options to modify your search. You need to enter a keyword into at least one of these filters, and you can also use multiple filters:

  • All of these words - Get results containing every word
  • Any of these words - Get results containing one or more word
  • The phrase - Get results containing the words together as a phrase
  • Without these words - Do not get results containing one or more word

4. Select from the drop-down menus in the boxed filter options to further limit your search results and improve the accuracy of your search:

  • Type - Newspaper or Gazette
  • Titles and places - Publication titles (listed with their location and date range) 

Note: To search for a state or publication title, enter its name eg: New South Wales or AgeThe state name/publication title will appear in the drop-down list. When a full state name appears, its publication titles also appear alphabetically underneath it and can be scrolled through.

When you select the state name/publication title, it will appear in the search field as a green tag.

Repeat for each state/publication title that you want to view.

  • Date range - Article publication dates. You can enter a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD or enter a year, and the date range calendar will jump to that year, then you can select a month and date from there.
  • Category - Type of content eg. article, family notice, sports
  • Illustration type - Type of illustration (if article contains illustrations)
  • Word count - Quantity of words in the article 

5. When you have made your filter selections, select the green magnifying glass button underneath the boxed filter options on the right hand side. Trove will generate a filtered search results list.

6. You can further Refine your Results by selecting from the menu on the right hand side of the results list.


Search commands/Complex search query

You can also combine search commands with your keywords to construct a complex search query in the Search field. The following commands works specifically for newspapers and gazettes:

firstpageseq

Get articles found on a specific page number of an issue.

Examples:

  • aircraft missing firstpageseq:1 
  • court reports (firstpageseq:4 OR firstpageseq:5) 

Note: This will only search the page sequence number in Trove, which may not match the page number from the newspaper. Similarly, the only way to search for an article on the last page of an issue is if you know how many pages the issue has.

has:corrections

Get articles that have had text corrections corrections made to the OCR text transcription.

Examples:

  • rabbit has:corrections
  • rabbit NOT has:corrections
  • rabbit -has:corrections 

Note for text correction: Although your changes will be applied immediately, it may be several hours before they can be found in a search. Whilst article changes will be discoverable, the original uncorrected text will continue to be displayed in search results.


Highlighted words in articles

When you view an article from your search results, the keyword/s that you used will appear highlighted in yellow. This happens only if the word matches exactly.

For example, punctuation can affect whether or not a keyword is highlighted. In a search for "MacNay", occurrences of "Mac’Nay" will also be included in search results, but will not be highlighted.

When searching for a phrase, all occurrences of individual terms from that phrase will be highlighted, in addition to the phrase itself. For example, a search for the phrase "Beat around the bush" will also highlight occurrences of "beat", "around", "the" and "bush".

For information on how to remove text highlighting, please visit the Printing Help page.