skip to main content

Advanced Search

SEARCH TIPS for text fields

Boolean searches

Use the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or broaden your search results.

By default, an AND relationship is assumed between Search Within terms unless you specify a different operator in the Edit Query: input.

By default, an OR relationship is assumed between words within 1 Search Within term.

Searching for phrases

Enclose your search terms within double quotation marks (" ") to search for an exact match of that phrase.

If no quotation marks are used, search results will be populated with publications that contain your search terms somewhere in the text.

For example, if you search for "machine learning" the search engine will limit the results to publications that contain this exact phrase otherwise an OR will be assumed in between the words.

Curly quotes (“ ”) are also acceptable eg. “machine learning”

NOTE 1: opening and closing quotes must be of the same type; curly or straight. Please avoid entering “machine learning"

NOTE 2: single quotation marks (' ') are ignored and will not return exact phrase matches.

Wildcards

Use an asterisk (*) to specify any number of unknown characters. For example, if you search for comput*, the search engine will provide results that contain words such as compute, computation, computing, etc.

Use a question mark (?) to specify any single unknown character. For example, if you search for compute?, the search engine will provide results that contain words such as computer or computed but not computers because the question mark represents only one character.

NOTE: Wildcards cannot be used at the start of a search term or when searching for phrases within quotes.

Special Characters

The following characters have a special meaning when they appear in a query:

+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : /

To instruct Search to interpret any of these characters literally, rather as a special character, precede the character with a backslash character \

For example, the term web -based will search for web NOT base so either remove the space before - or escape it web \-based to find web-based documents.

Another example, complexity n^2 is best to be searched with escaping complexity n\^2 as ^ is interpreted as boost a term.