Searching

This feature searches the full-text, title, and subject areas of documents based on key words and phrases.

To do a simple search, enter a word or phrase and click the Search button. The default search will look at all document types in any language or category. The default search also searches for any instance of your word (or phrase) in the text, title, and subject, author and publisher. If you want to match a specific phrase, put quotation marks around it before clicking the Search button.



If you want to perform a search with multiple words or phrases, click the Advanced search button.

In order to improve the results of you search, words that are so common they appear in all books (such as "a", "an", and "the") are not included in searches, unless they are part of a phrase in quotes.

Search results are compiled by searching for each of the words or phrases. The order in which they are entered does not affect the search results.

If the search results contain more than 10 documents, the results are shown on multiple pages. To view the next page of results, click Next>> at the top of the page. To go directly to a particular results page, click the page number. Click <<Previous to go back a page in the results.

Initially, the search results are sorted by Score, listing the most relevant results first. The document with the most hits appears first in the list.
You can also click on the links at the top of the page to sort the search results by Title, Contributor (author) or Date.

• Sorting by Title displays the results in the alphabetical order of the document titles.
• Sorting by Contributor groups the results according to contributor (author, editor, etc.).
• Sorting by Date displays the results by publication date, with the newest documents listed first.

Advanced Search enables you to search by a number of different parameters.

Selecting the Advanced Search option presents you with two search fields, that can search the combination of Full-text, by Subject, Publisher or Contributor (author). If you would like to further narrow your search with additional search fields, you may click on the More button. (Up to 8 search fields are supported.)

If you have just performed a Simple Search, that criteria will be already entered in the first search field. The form also provides you with the following default settings:

• The first search field searches the text of all the books. You may change this to search by Subject, Title, Author (contributor), or Publisher.
• The second search field searches all the book subjects. You can change this as well.
• The search will be performed in All Documents, and All Languages. You may further restrict your search by using these drop down menus. You can select a specific document type, and / or language in which the document is written.

When performing a search, only documents that match ALL of your criteria are returned.

More, Fewer and Reset:

• Clicking on the More button will provide you with additional search fields.
• Clicking on the Fewer button will remove the last search field and keep all other search settings.
• The Reset button will erase all previously entered criteria and return you to the default Advanced Search.
• Any search fields that you leave blank will be ignored.

You can further narrow and improve your search directly from within the Search Results Page. Simply click on information pertaining to a given title on the right hand side of the screen to narrow your search by Contributor (author), Subject or Publisher.

For example, if you did a simple search for "coffee" and found thousands of documents, then noticed that one of the books had a subject "Transgenic plants", you could click on that subject to do a new refined search. The new search would include documents with "coffee" in the text and "Transgenic plants" in the subject.

The ebrary Reader's search capabilities are enhanced by the InfoTools interface. This search facility includes:

• Search Document allows additional searches within the current document.
• Search All Documents allows additional searches within the DCP.
• Search Web allows additional searches within the Web.
• Search Catalog for the selected term under:
  • Everything
  • Author
  • Title
  • Subject

If no search term is selected, Search Document and Search All Documents will pop-up a text dialog box to allow the search term to be entered. If a search term is selected, it will be automatically entered into the appropriate search.

Search Document

This facility is similar to Simple Search except that it is applied only to the current open document. The new search term is highlighted, and the Next/Previous Search Page buttons work on the new term.

Search All Documents

This facility is similar to Advanced Search. It is applied to all ebrary documents to which your library subscribes. The results appear in a new window.

This powerful feature helps you create a new or more refined search. Again, you can search in Text, Author, Subject, Title, and Publisher. You can optionally include your previous search terms.



If you choose not to "Include Previous Search" you'll get a brand new search of just the terms you type in.

If you choose to "Include Previous Search" you'll get a refinement of your last search, targeting your results to a more select group of documents.

Search Library

(Optional) Some libraries support searching across their entire collection (card catalog) and other digital content databases using this option.

Search Web

The selected search term will be fed to your favorite web search engine. The results appear in a new window.

A Boolean search uses the operators "AND," "OR" and "NOT" to refine your search results. When using a Boolean search, the operators must be in all caps as shown in the examples below.

• "mark twain" AND river - Will return documents containing both the phrase "Mark Twain" and the word river.
• twain AND NOT "mark twain" AND scanner - Will return documents that refer to the scanning term twain, and not the author Mark Twain.
• "paper airplane" OR "paper airplanes" - Will return documents are either singular or plural of that phrase.

A proximity search uses the operator "WITHIN" to search for words that are near, but not right next to other words. You can use the "WITHIN" operators and designate how close together in a document you would like your search words to be. Proximity and Boolean operators must be in all caps to work properly, as in the examples below.

• Thomas WITHIN-3 Edison - Will return results where Thomas and Edison are within three words of each other in the results.
• nixon WITHIN-30 mcnamara - Will return documents containing Nixon within 30 words of McNamara.
• business WITHIN-1 strategies - Will return documents that have the words business and strategies together.

You can also use parentheses to further define that search by typing:

• (business OR corporate) WITHIN-1 strategies - Will find documents with either business strategies or corporate strategies in the results.

There are a huge number of diverse documents in the ebrary collection. If you search for a very general topic, like "business," you may get thousands, or even tens of thousands of documents back that have something to do with your search. We will, of course, do our best to score and sort the best results to the top of the list. However, this may seem to be too many results, or "untargeted" results.

If you want even better results try making your search more specific. For example, doing a simple search for: business "strategic alliances", instead of simply: business, can reduce the found set by 90% and give you much more targeted results.

Use quoted strings instead of just words

Quoted strings will return only those books containing that complete phrase, rather than books with those words occurring anywhere in the book.

Use: "air power" to find books containing the phrase "air power",
rather than: air power, which will find every book that contains "air" and "power" anywhere within the book.

Use: "White House" to find books containing the phrase "White house",
rather than: White House, which will find every book that contains "white" and "house" anywhere within the book.

Use Proximity or Boolean searches.

If you are getting too many results back, or are looking for more relevant results, you can narrow your search with the ebrary proximity and Boolean features.

Use: "White House" WITHIN-30 Pentagon,
rather than: White House Pentagon.

Use: "Isaac Newton" AND calculus, or
"Isaac Newton" WITHIN-100 calculus
rather than: Isaac Newton calculus.

Sometimes you may be expecting a lot of results from a search and get very few back. There can be a number of reasons for this. Here are a few suggestions to improve your search results:

1. Your search terms may be misspelled. Misspelled words are seldom found. Double-check your spelling.
2. If you're using a multi-word Advanced Search for title or subject try changing a "title" search to "text" (maybe you have forgotten the exact title, or the subjects are not what you're expecting).
3. Use Boolean search to include plurals or other word forms (airplane AND airplanes rather than just airplane)
4. Although we have tens of thousands of books and documents, we don't have everything. Keep in mind if you are looking for a specific title it is possible that we do not have it. We may, however, have other books relevant to your research needs. Try searching for you keywords of interest instead of a given title.