Library Search has a number of advanced functions that can help you get more specific results from your searches.
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.
You can use the asterisk (*) to match zero or more characters.
The question mark (?) replaces one letter of a word, except at the end of a word where it is treated as punctuation.
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.
Using AND, OR, NOT in all capitals can modify your search behavior.
Capitalisation is ignored when searching other than for these Boolean operators.
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.
This search will return results that contain the terms email and security, and results that contain the terms email and privacy.
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 will give you more control over your results. It offers more options than basic search and can assist you in building more targeted searches.
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:
The second option in Advanced Search controls what the search will consider a match. You can choose from 3 options.
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".
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*
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.
You can use additional filters in Advanced Search to be even more targeted with results.
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.