The following is a guest post by Amy Swantner, a specialist in legislative information systems management within the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress.
Imagine the following: you are interested in finding legislation about a specific topic. You carefully choose search terms you think will find those bills most relevant to your needs. You enter your keywords, hit “search” and you get results – lots of them. The relevancy ranking sort is a big help, but sometimes you need another clue to decide quickly which results are likely to be of most interest to you.
KWIC to the rescue! KWIC, which stands for Key Word in Context, shows you two snippets of the text where your search terms appear. KWIC can be particularly helpful with bills, which can cover multiple legislative subjects.
The new KWIC search results are now the default display when you use the Legislation Text search form on Congress.gov.
To access the search form, use the “more options” link below the search bar, then choose “Legislation Text” from the menu.
Enter your search terms in the Words & Phrases box.
Your search results are returned in the KWIC display format with your search terms highlighted.
You can easily toggle off the KWIC display by unchecking the box in the top left just above the filters.
To learn more about legislation text, searching Congress.gov, and other enhancements visit our Help Center.
Thanks to my wonderful colleagues in the Law Library for the opportunity to tell you about this exciting new feature!