How can I get the most out of the British Newspaper Archive?

The British Newspaper Archive is equipped with a range of smart search features, which are designed to help you find results quickly and efficiently. Whether you’re searching for a particular person, or trying to locate coverage of a specific event, there are a variety of different ways to help you find what you’re looking for.

Refine your research with search filters

The first step in narrowing down your results is to make use of the British Newspaper Archive’s search filters. You can set up your filters prior to searching in the Advanced Search form, or you can filter your results after you have made your search. Whatever route you choose, using search filters is a powerful tool to help track down the most relevant results.

On the British Newspaper Archive, you can choose to filter your results by:

• Date published (selecting either a date range or a specific day)
• Publication title, with the ability to select multiple publication titles
• Place, county and country of publication
• Date added to the newspaper archive, to help you keep track of recent additions
• Free to view or paid access articles

Furthermore, you can choose to search only front pages, or, under ‘coverage type,’ to filter by national, regional or local newspapers. There is also the option to explore our collection via article type, allowing you to select categories such as family notices, politics, and sport.

Flex your phrases

If you’re searching with a phrase, you may like to consider adding quotation marks around a term in the search bar. This way, you’ll only be shown results in which your search term exactly appears. For example, if you search ‘Hyde Park,’ you’ll only receive results referring to ‘Hyde Park,’ and not any other park. You can get more specific too, for example searching with the term ‘Hyde Park demonstration.’

Wanting more granularity? The Advanced Search form on the British Newspaper Archive allows you to adjust the flexibility of your phrase by specifying how many words can be appear between the terms in your phrase. For example:

• ‘Hyde Park demonstration’ ~0 – terms must be right next to each other
• ‘Hyde Park demonstration’ ~1 – could be up to one word between terms
• ‘Hyde Park demonstration’ ~2 – could be up to two words between terms

This way, you may be able to uncover news about a demonstration in Hyde Park that was not reported using the exact phrase ‘Hyde Park demonstration.’

Multiple name search

If you’re searching for specific people in the newspapers, our search allows you to search for multiple names at once. Simply add the names in the Names search box, separated by a comma, and click search.

This is a good way to narrow down commonly appearing names, especially when using the names of additional family members or others you know were involved in a particular event, such as a wedding or funeral.

Omit keywords

As well as searching for keywords, you can search for words that aren’t included in the newspaper text. This is helpful when you are searching for something that commonly occurs in an irrelevant context, such as omitting terms like ‘HMS’ or ‘road’ from the search for ‘Victory,’ when looking for a pub named as such.

To remove search terms, simply add a minus sign. So to perform a search for ‘Victory,’ excluding ship and street names, you can use the following search query in the keyword box:

• Victory -HMS, -road, -street

To search for ‘Victory’ and ‘pub,’ whilst omitting certain terms, you can use the below search query, again in the keyword box:

• Victory, pub, -HMS, -road, -street

Try a wildcard

If you’re struggling to find what you’re looking for, you may be up against a spelling issue. Perhaps the spelling of the name or keyword is different from what you’re expecting, or perhaps a letter or two has been dropped during the digitisation process.

A wildcard search allows you to search for terms with a variety of spellings. All you need to do is replace a letter with a question mark or an asterisk. One question mark (?) represents a single unknown character, whilst two question marks (??) represents two unknown characters. If you’re not sure how many characters you need, use an asterisk (*). An asterisk represents multiple unknown characters.

For example, to cover multiple spellings of the name ‘Stephen,’ you could try searching ‘Ste?en’ or ‘Ste??en.’

A wildcard can go anywhere within a term – at the start, middle, or end – and can be used multiple times, e.g. ‘Ma*ga*et.’