Open Access

Boolean Operators AND, OR, NOT

When you use the Simple Search, all terms are combined by AND automatically. For a more tightly focused search you may use the Boolean Operators to combine different search terms.

AND: The document has to contain all search terms.

OR: The document has to contain one of the search terms. This function broadens your search and is recommended, when there are different terms for the same meaning.

article OR paper

NOT: This function works excluding and might be useful to reduce a large result list: Documents, which contain the one term, may not contain the other.

article NOT paper

The Boolean Operators work for the Advanced Search as well. You may use them to combine different search terms within one search field. For example, to search for documents of the author "Doe" in the years 2002 or 2003, use the query:

Author: Doe
Year: 2002 OR 2003

Wildcards

In the field 'Search:', you may use the symbols '*' and '?' as wildcards. Use them in place of a character or characters that are unknown or that may differ. You cannot use them in front of a word or search string.

Example 1: chemi* finds chemical but also chemistry or chemist.

Example 2: licen?e finds licence and license.

You may use double quotes (") to search for phrases.