Searching Tips

Boolean operators
To fine tune your search, you can use “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT” logical operators to link your search words together, and/or limit the search to a specific field. These operators will help you narrow or broaden your search to better express the terms you are looking for and to retrieve the exact information you need quickly.

• USING THE “AND” OPERATOR (= intersection): If you have a search term that is too general, you can append several terms together using “AND”. By stringing key terms together, you can further define a specific search and reduce the number of results.
• USING THE “OR” (= union) OPERATOR: In order to broaden a search, you can link terms together by using the “OR” operator. Linked by this operator, your words are searched simultaneously and independently of each other.
• USING THE “NOT” OPERATOR (=exclusion): In order to narrow a search, you can link words together by using the “NOT” operator. This operator will help you to filter out specific topics you do not wish included as part of your search.

Note: In the writing of your request, use the boolean operators in their English form.

Faceted refining
Faceted refining allows to fine tune the results of a first search by using one or more criteria (the facets).
The list of facets appears on the search results page, on the left:

• Filter: it allows to select the records with abstract and the database referencing them
• Document type
• Year of publication
• Discipline
• Language
• Country of publication
• Author country
• Origin: it allows to select the records from the Inist-CNRS or from a partner organization/li>

These facets can be folded or unfolded by clicking on their title.
A click on the selected button at the level of a facet or a filter repeats the same search, to which the filter corresponding to the selected facet is added.
You can select several facets at the same time, with “AND” as logical operator between two selected facets, and “OR” as logical operator for two selected values inside a same facet (example: “France” OR “Belgium” in the country facet).
You can sort by alphabetical order or by order of frequency if the number of results of the faceted search exceeds 10.

Bounce search
It is possible to rebound and launch a new search on a different criterion from the display of a record. Just click on a value shown in blue (author, journal title, keywords…) in the displayed results.

Query formulation
In the event there are several slightly different spellings for a particular term (for example: organization or organisation), you can use the ? symbol to report the possibility of a variation: organi?ation.

To search for a group of terms precisely enter it between quotes " ".
For example: "high pressure liquid chromatography".

Wildcards
Wildcard searches can be run on individual terms, using ? to replace a single character, and * to replace zero or more characters:
qu?ck bro*
multiple ? are possible with one ? for each character. bernst??n finds both bernstein and bernstien.
diss*ation give for exemple dissociation or dissemination.
Be aware that wildcard queries can use an enormous amount of memory and perform very badly — just think how many terms need to be queried to match the query string "a* b* c*".
Wildcard at the beginning of a word (eg *ing) is particularly heavy, because all terms in the index need to be examined, just in case they match.
A minimum of three characters are required for a wilcard query, example bio*.
English stemming (Porter algorithm) is applied on textual fields and so wildcards are not necessary to search both usual singular and plural forms. enthalpy give both enthalpy and enthalpies.

Wildcard searches can not be run with exact phrase queries. "bond diss*ation enthalpy" give zero document.