Field Searching: Searching Footnotes and Surface Text

Since we’ve been looking at some of the various fields that you can search in Libronix resources, like OTQuote, DisputedPassage, and LaterAddition in the Greek New Testament and WordsOfChrist (or WOC) in most English Bibles that include the New Testament, I figured I’d continue this little series and mention some of the other fields that you can search.

A field that most books have that you may find helpful in your searching is the footnotes field. You can search footnote text in isolation from the rest of the text of the book by using Footnote: prior to the word or phrase you are searching for (e.g., Footnote:Packer).

Footnotes usually contain more detailed information with bibliographic citations and additional sources for further study. You might find it helpful to search the footnotes of a book to find more books and articles about a topic you’re studying. Not all books include a bibliography at the end, so searching the footnotes with certain key words might give you some great leads to dig deeper.

Another place this might be helpful is in the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament. The search Footnote:NA27 turns up 151 mentions of the NA27 in the footnotes showing the places where the underlying Greek of the ESV differs from the NA27 text. If you wanted to find all the places where that variation involves θεος, for example, you could search for Footnote:θεος, which turns up 4 places where the ESV Greek text follows a different reading from the NA27 either adding or omitting θεος.

Alternatively, if you ever wanted to exclude footnotes from your searches, many of our books support a Surface field. So a search for Surface:Barth, for example, would ignore any hits in the footnotes.

To see what fields are supported for a given resources, look in "About This Resource," which you can access from the right-click menu in My Library.