General Search in SciSearch Plus
Title/Subject/Abstract Searching

SciSearch at LANL: http://search.lanl.gov/

General tips for searching

You can search for either words or phrases in titles, abstracts, or added subject keywords.

Remember that abstracts are not always present.

Searching for words

SciSearch automatically searches for regular singulars and plurals and for a few other variations in word endings.

You should always consider entering synonyms or word variations.

• telomere finds telomere or telomeres but not telomerase.

Use quotation marks to avoid finding word variations.

• "telomere" finds only telomere, not telomeres or telomerase.
• "protein kinase" finds only protein kinase, not protein kinases.

Boolean searching in SciSearch

Words can be combined with AND, OR, NOT, or NEAR, and with parentheses.

Enclose operators in angle brackets: < >

• hiv <and> lymphoma

AND requires that both terms be present.

• genes <and> regulation

OR finds records containing either term.

• chromium <or> lead

NOT excludes records containing a term. Use NOT with care. All records containing the unwanted word are eliminated even if they contain terms that may be of interest.

• fracture <not> medicine

NEAR finds words in either order with the specified number of intervening words.

• genes <near/5> regulation (finds regulation within a maximum of five words of genes)

Truncation in SciSearch

Words are automatically "stemmed" to find singular, plural, and adjective forms of words.

• TELOMERE, finds TELOMERE or TELOMERES (but not TELOMERASE).

• Put your search term in double quotation marks to search exactly that term.

  "PROTEIN" finds only PROTEIN. It does not find PROTEINS, PROTEINASE, etc.

Use an asterisk to represent an unlimited number of characters.

• TELOMER* finds TELOMERE, TELOMERES, or TELOMERASE.
• Do not use an asterisk when searching authors.

Use a question mark for exactly one character.

• INSECT? finds INSECTA or INSECTS but it doesn't find INSECT.

A minimum of two characters must be used before * or ?

Searching for phrases

Enter a phrase to search for the exact phrase or word variations:

• nucleic acid finds nucleic acid or nucleic acids

Use quotation marks to find only an exact phrase.

• "nucleic acid" finds only the phrase nucleic acid

More information

On the General Search page, select Tips/FAQs.

Related Topics

• General search introduction
• Author searching
• Boolean searching and truncation
• Journal searching
• Institution searching
• Limiting by date and number of citations to retrieve
• Sorting results
• Displaying, marking, and printing citations
• Search history
• LinkSeeker and links to full text
• Table of contents

Michael Newman
Falconer Biology Library
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-5021
mnewman@stanford.edu

Last modified: April, 2003