“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent” -- Bertrand Russell (English Logician and Philosopher 1872-1970)
Most search engines have advanced search features that enable you to hone your search strategy to produce more relevant results. ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com) is no exception.
The easiest way to advance your search is to click the Advanced Search button. Menu driven, it guides you effortlessly through the process of customizing your search strategy.
For multiple searches, save time by learning how to enter the search string directly. By avoiding the process of stepping through the menu each time, you can jump to your results a little bit faster. Get to the search box by clicking Expert Search on the Advanced Search page.
Here are a few examples to give you some ideas on how to improve your search results …
Find articles containing the word “dibenzothiophene” and published after 2008pub-date > 2008 and dibenzothiophene
Find articles containing the word “desulfurization” but NOT the word “coal”desulfurization AND NOT coal
Find articles containing both the words “desulfurization” AND “Rhodococcus”desulfurization AND Rhodococcus
Find articles containing the phrase “heavy oil” and written by author(s) affiliated with Exxonmobil"heavy oil" and AFFILIATION(exxonmobil)
Find articles appearing in the journal “Fuel Processing Technology” and containing the word “macromolecule”
ALL(macromolecule) AND SRCTITLE(Fuel Processing Technology)
You can copy one of the search strings above to your clipboard and then paste it into the ScienceDirect Expert Search box. Click Search and browse the results.
Which leads me to today’s second time-saver tip: Construct a search that provides the results you need, then copy the search string and save it in a Notepad or Word document for future use.
ScienceDirect provides detailed information on the Expert Search function. Some of them are reproduced below.
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All Sources Expert Search Tips
Choose search terms which are specific or closely related to the topic of interest.
Use the Specific Author field when searching names.
Use the singular form of the word.
Enclose stop words in brackets.
Use connectors.
Prioritize your search terms.
Use wildcard characters to combine or eliminate search terms.
Observe the guidelines for searching special characters and formulas.
Search document fields to limit your search results.
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Using the singular form of a word finds the singular, plural, and possessive forms of most words.
Example city finds "city", "cities", and "city's"
criterion finds "criteria" and "criterion"
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Handling Stop Words
Stop words are not searchable unless they are enclosed in brackets ({}) or double (" ") quotation marks.
•The word "not" is not a stop word, but it is a reserved word. To search for "not" enclose it in brackets: {not}.Example To search for the phrase, "not contested", enter {not contested}.
•The word "a" is a common word, but not a stop word. To search for a phrase containing a common word, enter the entire phrase as your search.Example To search for the phrase "one in a million", enter {one in a million}.
•If you are not sure whether a word is a stop word, omit the word from your search and use the W/nnproximity connector to account for the word's presence in the search.
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Connectors and Proximity Operators - Expert Search
You can use connectors and proximity operators to specify the words you want to include or exclude from your search results and to search for more than one word in a single search. If you use more than one connector or operator in your search, ScienceDirect® interprets the search according to the order of precedence.
To search for a specific phrase, enclose the terms in double (" ") or, for an exact match, brackets ({}). See Searching for Phrases for more information.
Connector Description
AND When AND is used, all of the terms in your search must appear in the returned documents even if the terms are far apart from each other. Example lesion AND pancreatic would only return documents that contained both the terms lesion and pancreatic.
AND is the default connector. When you enter 2 or more search terms, AND is automatically inserted between any spaces or hyphens in the terms.
Example If you searched for heart attack or heart-attack both would be searched as heart AND attack.
OR Use OR when at least one of your search terms must appear in returned documents. You can use OR to search for synonyms, alternate spellings, or abbreviations.
Example kidney OR renal would return documents that contained either of the terms kidney or renal.
AND NOT Use AND NOT to exclude specific terms from returned documents.
Example ganglia OR tumor AND NOT malignant would find documents that contained the terms ganglia or tumor, but not the term malignant.
W/n Use W/n to specify how far apart terms may appear in documents. W represents "within", and n represents the maximum number of words between the terms.
Note W/n does not specify the word order. Either word may appear first.
Example pain W/15 morphine would find documents that had the terms "pain" and "morphine" within 15 words of each other.
Use the following guidelines when choosing a number for n:
•To find terms in the same phrase, use W/3, W/4, or W/5.
•To find terms in the same sentence, use W/15.
•To find terms in the same paragraph, use W/50.
PRE/n Use PRE/n to find documents in which the first term precedes the second term within a specified number (n) of words.
Example behavioural PRE/3 disturbances would find documents in which behavioural precedes disturbances by three or less words.
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Wildcard Characters
You can use wildcard characters to easily find variations of search words, making your search simpler.
Use this wildcard... To do this...
Asterisk (*) Replace zero or more characters in a search word. For example, use * to find a root word plus all the words made by adding letters to the end of it.Example h*r*t finds "heart", "harvest", "homograft", "hypervalent", and others
Question mark (?) Replace exactly one character in a search word. Use one question mark for each character you want to replace.Example gro?t finds "grout" or "groat", but not "groundnut" or "grommet"
•Make sure the number of question marks in the search term corresponds to the number of letters that you want to replace. Example transplant?? finds "transplanted" and "transplanter".
Note transplant?? does not find "transplantation", " transplanting", or "transplant". Because there are two wildcard characters, the search finds only words with exactly two extra characters. To find all variations of "transplant", use the asterisk (*) wildcard character.
•Use a question mark to hold a space for certain variations in spelling at any point in a word.
Example bernst??n finds both the "ei" and the "ie" spelling of the name.
Note For some words, it is better to use the asterisk to account for spelling variations. For example, searching for behavi?r does not return results that include "behaviour"; however, searching for behavi*r returns results that include both "behavior" and "behaviour".
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Supported Character Set
ScienceDirect® supports the UTF-8 character set, which means that you can enter all UTF-8 characters directly in the search form, including non-Roman and accented characters. See the Unicode web site for more information about UTF-8.
Character Example
Greek alphabet To search the Greek letter Ω, enter Ω or omega.
Subscript and superscript Enter subscripted and superscripted characters on the same line as the other characters. To search for the chemical notation "H2O," enter H2O.
Accented characters To search for the name Fürst, enter Fürst or Furst.
Non-alphanumeric characters Characters such as hyphens, bullets, arrows, daggers, plus signs, and minus signs are ignored unless they are enclosed in brackets. Example To search for the term "high-risk", enter {high-risk}.
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All Sources Expert Search Fields
To restrict your search to a specific field, include the field name in your search.
Example title (neurotoxin) finds all the documents that contain "neurotoxin" in the article title.
Searches that do not specify a specific field will search the full record.
Example neurotoxin finds all documents where "neurotoxin" was mentioned anywhere in the document including in a title, in keywords, in an abstract, and in references.
Field Search Tips
•Field names can be entered in upper or lower case.
•Field names must be spelled exactly the way they are listed below, including hyphens.
•Use the following syntax for text fields to specify a field name in your search string:
field_name(search_term)
Where search_term is the term you want to find and field_name is one of the fields in the Field Name table.
•For many fields, you can enter 3-letter codes instead of the full field name.Example Both of these searches search the title, abstract, and keywords fields:
title-abstr-key(renal failure)
tak(renal failure)
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source: http://help.sciencedirect.com/flare/sdhelp_Left.htm#CSHID=stexpt_main_all.htmStartTopic=Content%2Fstexpt_main_all.htmSkinName=sdhelp_skin
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