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Guide to using Library Search

Use different features in Library Search to find the results you need, including books, articles, journals, video, audio, theses, past exam papers, course readings and more.

Library Search advanced search techniques

Library Search has a number of advanced functions that can help you get more specific results from your searches.

Phrase Searching

You can search for exact phrases using quotation marks, e.g. "global warming".

This will return results that contain the exact phrase you have used, or the inflection of the exact phrase. If you wish to exclude the inflection of the phrase, use NOT, e.g. "neural network" NOT "neural networks".

Quotation marks cannot be used with wildcards, for example queries such as "global warm*".

This technique is very precise and variations such as different spelling or typos will not be included in your results.

Wildcard characters (* and ?)

You can use the asterisk (*) to match zero or more characters.

  • cultur* will retrieve results that contain various alternative endings, such as culture, cultural, and culturally.

The question mark (?) replaces one letter of a word, except at the end of a word where it is treated as punctuation.

  • ols?n will retrieve results that contain Olsen and Olson, but not Olsson.

Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a word and cannot be used in conjunction with quotation marks. Queries such as ?aying and "social network*" are not supported.

Using wildcards can disable search features that are normally done automatically. For example, searching for archaeology will automatically use synonym matching to retrieve results for both archaeology and archeology, but searching archaeolog* will retrieve results matching only on archaeology. This means less results may be returned when using wildcards.

Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT

Using AND, OR, NOT in all capitals can modify your search behavior.

  • AND returns results that contain all terms. It is best used for dissimilar terms such as environment AND pollution. You can also use it to adjust preference with multiple search terms. For example earthquake fault will retrieve the same results as earthquake AND fault, but searching on earthquake fault will preference results where the words are together.
  • OR returns results that contain either term. It is best used for similar terms such as adolescent OR teenager.
  • NOT returns results that do not include a term. It is best used for excluding undesirable results, such as cloning NOT sheep.

Capitalisation is ignored when searching other than for these Boolean operators.

Grouping terms

Use parentheses (brackets) to group search terms and alter the order of how the terms are searched. Using parentheses is particularly useful when using more than one Boolean operator. Below are some examples of how grouped and ungrouped searches will return results differently.

  • email AND (security OR privacy)

This search will return results that contain the terms email and security, and results that contain the terms email and privacy.

  • Shakespeare AND tragedy OR sonnet

This search, without parentheses, will return results that contain either Shakespeare and tragedy, or results with sonnet. It will not return any results that contain Shakespeare and sonnet.

Using Advanced Search

Using Advanced Search will give you more control over your results. It offers more options than basic search and can assist you in building more targeted searches.

  1. Click the Advanced search link in the Library Search bar.

Advanced Search option

  1. Build your search in the expanded Advanced Search interface.

Advanced Search criteria options, including field selectors, prefiltering options, and additional search lines for complex queries

  1. Click to run your search. The Advanced Search interface will collapse, giving more room for your search results.

Advanced Search filters while collapsed, open with Advanced Search criteria or adjust the summary line

  1. Click the arrow (above the Search button) to expand the display again and adjust the search criteria. Your last choice to expand or collapse the display will be remembered.

Field Selectors

The first option in Advanced Search is field selector. This allows you to specify what part of an item’s details should be searched. 

When you choose one of these options, it will only search for your terms in the selected fields:

  • Any field: the default field, which will search for your terms in all item details, such as title, author/creator, subject, etc
    • Using the Search within full text toggle extends this search also to indexed full text content of online resources
  • Title: title fields, including varying titles such as translated titles, series titles
  • Author/creator: author fields, including main authors and contributing editors
  • Subject: subject headings and subject terms assigned
  • ISBNInternational Standard Book Number of books and other monograph publications
  • ISSNInternational Standard Serial Number of journals and other serial publications
    • This is a particularly useful option for finding all Articles in Library Search published in a particular journal
  • Call Number: Library of Congress call numbers or locally assigned running numbers, such as for Microfiche
    • Take care to enter the call number exactly, or alternatively remove all spaces
  • Publisher: Publisher or distributor
  • Additional title: Series titles, uniform titles, other additional entries for personal, meeting, corporate and society names
  • Advisory statement: Content advice, including cultural sensitivity information
  • Description: Summary information
  • UQ School, Centre or Institute: University of Queensland organisational units, for resources such as Theses
  • UQ eSpace series: specialised groupings of resources in UQ eSpace
  • UQ eSpace collection: broader groupings of resources in UQ eSpace
  • Database category: curated categories, including subjects aligned with School and Faculties, as seen also in Database Search
  • Collection: resources highlighted in curated collections, as featured in Collection Discovery

Search type

The second option in Advanced Search controls what the search will consider a match. You can choose from 3 options.

contains

This will return results that contain all the search terms you have used, but the terms may be in a different order and may not be as close together, although results where the terms are closer together will be placed higher in the results.

Example: title contains spy from the cold finds the book with the title The spy who came in from the cold because the terms spy and cold are contained somewhere in the title.

It would also find other items that contain some or all those terms (in any order), for e.g. Citizen spy television, espionage and cold war culture. It will ignore very common words like "a", "the", "in", "from".

exact phrase

This option is the equivalent of using quotation marks as a phrase search.

This will return results that contain terms that exactly match the search terms you have used, in that order, as well as inflections of the exact phrase. It will find matching terms anywhere in the field(s).

For example: title exact phrase to kill a would find the book with the title To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as the article How not to kill a cockroach.

For example: subject exact phrase neural network will find results containing neural network and neural networks, but matches to neural network will be higher in the results.

Use of wildcards with this search type is not supported, such as social network*

starts with

This will return Title results that start with the exact search terms you have used, in that order.

For example: title starts with one hundred years would find the book: One hundred years of solitude, and also all other items starting with one hundred years.

Only the Title field is supported with a starts with search type.

Other filters

You can use additional filters in Advanced Search to be even more targeted with results.

  • Content type - select from Any type, Articles, Conference papers, Conference proceedings, Databases, and more. You can also leave this set to the default of “Any type” and instead use the Content type filter after you search.
  • Published in the last - select a specific year, date range, or the number of years.

Advanced Search example

This is an example of a complex search strategy built in Advanced Search for a targeted research query. It uses three search lines, exact phrase and contains search types, and targeted search fields, for any Articles by content type, published in the last 10 years.

Advanced Search example, with expanded display for all search criteria