The TARGET Command

DialogWeb Help: The TARGET Command

Example: Locate those records most relevant to the search topic affirmative action and women.
Command: target 'affirmative action' women.

The TARGET command performs a statistical analysis of the occurrence of the search terms retrieved by your search and rates the records using the following criteria:

the number of times each term appears in a record
the number of times each term appears in the entire database
which terms coexist in the record
the proximity of the terms to each other

The fifty records that are found to be the most relevant to your topic are retrieved and ordered in a set, beginning with the most relevant records.

TARGET is available in command mode and menu mode. To use the menu mode, enter a BEGIN command for a file or group of files and then enter target. The system prompts you through your search query and the display of the search results. You can enter your terms in a single command.

The options for entering TARGET search terms are:

enter a phrase by enclosing the terms in single quotes, for example, target 'heart surgery'
enter multiple search terms in a single line separated by spaces, for example, target 'affirmative action' women
enter like terms or synonyms in parentheses, for example, target (dog canine)
use the ? truncation symbol to retrieve a variety of word endings, for example, target teenage?
use an asterisk (*) preceding terms that MUST be present in every record, for example, target earthquake *risk