The GERM database contains more than 27,000 documents — critical to the understanding of on-going globalisation processes — which are available on its Website and classified into different headings and thematic items. In order to facilitate your research for information and documents, GERM has developed an efficient and user-friendly search engine which is now operational:


1. You can look for a single word by specifying whether you are searching on the whole database or just in one specific heading or item.
- Example: Governance (in order to find all the articles including the word governance)

2. You can look for an exact expression by using quotation marks (placed immediately before and after the expression).
- Example: "Global governance”, "Cultural politics and globalisation”, ...

3. You can look for the documents including at least one of the words you are searching for.
- Example: Governance gouvernance (in order to find all the articles in English and/or French containing the words governance and/or gouvernance)

4. You can look for the documents including ALL the words you are searching for, but which are not necessarily put in the same order. In that case, you need to add a plus sign (+) immediately before the word, preceded and followed by a space tab.
- Example: +Governance +Africa (in order to find all articles in English including the words governance and Africa).

5. To exclude a word from your search, please put the minus sign (-) immediately before the word to be excluded, preceded and followed by a space tab (but, please, no space between the sign and word!).
- Example: +Governance –Africa (to find all the articles including the word governance but not the word Africa).

6. The search engine ignores short-sized words which are considered semantically insignificant (for example: a, an, the, and, or...) as well as words with less than four letters.

7. The search engine is not case-sensitive (UPPER and lower case). Accents and diacritic signs (French cedilla, Spanish tilde, German umlaut...) are also ignored.

8. You can also shorten words searched for (singular/plural, gender, ...) by adding an asterisk to a chain of characters "abcdef”.
- Example: gov* (governance, government, governing...), cultur* (culture, cultural, culturally...)


Enjoy your search!