SEARCH TIP | DESCRIPTION | EXAMPLES |
Truncation Useful for finding prefixes and alternative endings of a word |
The asterisk (*) replaces a number of characters including 0 anywhere in a word |
develop* → develop, develops, developing, development, developmental *archaeolog* → archaeological,osteoarchaeology |
Wildcards Useful for finding alternative spellings of a word |
The question mark (?) replaces a single character anywhere in a word The dollar ($) replaces a single character including 0 anywhere in a word |
organi?ation → organisation, organization steel$ → steel, steels |
Plurals |
The singular form of a word finds plurals and alternative forms of the search term and spelling variations (e.g. UK and US spellings) It doesn't work with phrases and wildcards |
walk → walk, walking, walked color* → color, colors, colorful |
Hyphenated words |
Search for hyphenated words and phrases by entering the terms with and without the hypen |
speech-impairment → speech-impairment, speech impairment |
Phrases If you enter a phrase without quotation marks - the Web of Science search engine will retrieve records that contain all of the words you entered The words may or may not appear close together |
To search for an exact phrase - enclose the phrase in double quotation marks Note: - Applies only to Topic and Title searches - Truncation symbol (*) and wildcard (?) can be used - Wildcard ($) cannot be used inside quotation marks - In exact phrases the singular form of a word does not retrieve the plural form |
"energy conservation" → energy conservation |
Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT Use Boolean operators to combine your search Without parentheses operator precedence is: 1. NEAR/x 2. SAME 3. NOT 4. AND 5. OR Use parentheses to override operator precedence. The expression inside the parenthesis is executed first Note: In Web of Science boolean operators are not case sensitive |
AND Use AND to combine multiple concepts OR Use OR when you have similar words to describe a concept or topic NOT Use NOT to exclude results containing terms |
At least one term must appear → liver OR cirrhosis Both terms must appear → cognitive architecture AND robots Exclude one term → lung NOT cancer |
Nesting – (…) |
Group similar words together using brackets | → (college OR university) AND athletics |
Proximity Operators - NEAR/x, SAME The Proximity operator finds words within a certain distance from each other
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NEAR/x - the /x element says how many words between the two keywords, but not the order the words are in Just using NEAR will be treated as NEAR 15 SAME - can be used in Address field only
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Rabies NEAR/5 rabbits → where rabies can be found within a distance of five words of rabbits in the title or article abstract Mineral resources SAME Beijing → finds records containing an author address in which the terms mineral resources and Beijing both appear |
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