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Introduction
General Rules
Main Search Strategies
Extra Benefits of Full-Text Searching
Stemming
Using "Wildcards"
Boolean Logic
Phrase Searching
Capitalization and Punctuation
Search Term Highlighting
Search Tools
Search Errors
Use QuickSearch for simple queries. QuickSearch is found on the portal home page and on most interior portal and journal pages.
For more complicated questions, or to have greater control over your search parameters and results, use Advanced Search. You can reach Advanced Search by clicking on the "[Advanced]" link found near the Quick Search boxes. The Advanced Search page allows you to control additional features such as date range, geographic coordinates, type and/or language of article, standard or condensed results format, and type of sorting used.
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complexing
may turn up articles containing similar words such as complex and
complexes. These additional words may not always be highlighted in the text. To disable stemming, use the Phrase option in the Advanced Search page, or, on QuickSearch, enclose each individual term in quotation marks.
Using "Wildcards"
glaci*
will return articles containing glacier, glacial, and glaciation; likewise, a search for
phospha*
will return articles containing phosphatase and phosphate.
Wildcards can also be used to truncate words before non-English characters such as an umlaut (ü) or an accent (é). Since these characters cannot be searched, a word such as the author name Grundström should be searched as Grundstr*. Note that wildcards can only be used after characters; any characters following a wildcard in a single word will be discarded, and may cause an error.
AND,
OR, NOT are available for searching in the Keyword, Title, Title & Abstract, and Thesaurus terms fields. They can be used by themselves or in combination to specify your search terms. Words within a field are assumed to be connected by AND
unless otherwise specified - note that the radio button for "all" beside this field is selected as the default.
This default AND connector limits the search results to articles that contain all of the terms that are entered in the field. For example, a search for
Thailand tsunami tidal wave
will return all articles that contain all the terms specified.
Using the OR operator would expand your search results to include articles containing any of the terms in your search.
The NOT operator limits your search to articles containing the first term but not the second term. For example, a search on
tsunami NOT
thailand
returns articles containing the term tsunami
but excludes articles also containing the word thailand.
Be careful when using the NOT function for it can easily eliminate articles that may be useful.
NOTE that when using boolean terms, it does not matter if you select 'any' 'all' or 'phrase' from the 'words:' section. They will all produce the same result when combined with boolean operators.
In Quick Search, you can also use double quote marks (" ") to perform a search on an exact phrase. You can also use the Boolean Logic operators with 2 or more phrases, such as "upper Miocene" AND "Newark Group". This will retrieve articles containing both phrases.
In the Advanced Search, selecting the Phrase option requires that the entered terms be treated like a phrase. It is also possible to search on multiple phrases in a single field.
Enter the phrases using double quote marks, such as "upper Cretaceous" "New Brunswick" and select the All option.
Punctuation is not searched and is treated as a space. The only exceptions are parentheses "()" and asterisks "*". The parentheses and
the asterisk "*", or wildcard character, have special meaning in the search context and cannot be searched in the text. If a search term includes punctuation (such as a dash
"-" or a plus "+"), enclose the whole word in quotation marks to ensure that proper spacing is maintained in the search.
"Exuma Sound"
will highlight instances of the phrase "Exuma Sound", as well as any uses of the words Exuma or Sound.
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(1) an error occurred with the search engine program itself, or
(2) there may not be any articles matching the search criteria.
If your search was executed properly but did not return any articles, the message
"Your search retrieved zero articles."
will be displayed at the top of the screen, along with some suggestions for modifying your search. In this case, the search can be broadened as described above to redefine the search. Appropriate use of wildcards with search terms, or author names for which you are not sure of the exact spelling, can help. There is also the possibility that no articles matching your interests are in the journal's collection.
When a true search error occurs, the message
"There was a problem with our search system."
will appear at the top of the screen. This most commonly means that too many articles were returned. This will happen if a common word (for example, and or the) is used. Single letters not included in a phrase will return similar errors. Finally, note that parentheses come in sets: if only one is used, an error will result. Ensure that you are not using common words or single characters; if the error cannot be resolved, send us feedback describing the problem.
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