Keyword searches

Use the menu on the left to learn how to use special terms and shorcuts for creating advance searches in the keyword input box.

AND/OR searches

AND and OR are special words called boolean operators which allow terms to be combined to create specific searches.

AND, "+" (plus sign), OR, NOT and "-" (minus sign) are all valid Boolean operators. Each is described here:

OR

The OR operator is the default operator. This means that if there is no boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used.

To search for articles that contain either solar or organic:

or

AND

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the article title or summary. To search for documents that contain the words solar and organic:

+ (Plus sign)

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in the article title or summary.

To search for articles that must contain solar and may contain organic:

NOT

The NOT operator excludes articles which contain the term after NOT. To search for documents that contain solar but not organic:

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

- (Minus sign)

The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol.

To search for documents contain solar but not organic:

Phrases

Phrases are a sequence of more than one word. Exact phrases can be searched by enclosing them in quotes (""). To search for the phrase organic products:

Phrases can be combined with boolean operators. To search for articles that contain the phrase organic products but NOT the phrase environmental risks:

Grouping

Parentheses can be used to group clauses together. This can be used to control the boolean operators in a search.

To search for articles that contain either solar or wind turbine and energy:

This makes sure that the term energy exists and either solar or wind turbine also exist.

Boosting a Term

To boost the importance of a particular term use the caret, "^", symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be in the search results.

For example, if you are searching for solar organic and you want the term solar to be more relevant in the results:

This will make articles with the term solar appear more relevant than articles with only the term organic. You can also boost phrases:

By default, the boost factor is 1. Although the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (e.g. 0.2)

Title and Summary Searching

By default all searches look at both the the Title and Summary of the article. You can create searches that look at only one or the other of those, or that use different search criteria for each.

To search for articles where the Title contains solar:

To search for articles where the Summary contains solar and hydrogen:

Different Title and Summary searches can be combined and each one can use any of the other keyword search features.

To search for articles where the Title contains energy and the Summary contains solar but does NOT contain coal plant:

Proximity Searches

You can use a proximity search to search for words within a specific distance of each other. To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a phrase.

To search for articles that have solar and hydrogen within 10 words of each other: