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Hints for more fulfilling searches
- Boolean Operators
- 'AND', 'AND NOT', and 'OR'
- Metacharacters
- The bad news: In general, punctation and other non-alphanumeric characters are not indexed and cannot currently be searched for. Currently some interesting characters like (,), and = are not searchable. Regrettably, this means that one cannot search for SU(3) or c=1 at this time (but searching for 'c' AND '1' will give hits on 'c = 1').
The good news: The characters ^,_,{,},+, and - are indexed. For example, searching for K^+ or nu_e will work - be aware that authors aren't always consistent in how super- and subscripts are presented.
Non-indexed characters are stripped out from the search query. - Stemming
- Most fields stem words automatically (searching for superconductors will match superconducting)
- Wild card truncation
- Wild card '*' can only be used anywhere but at the beginning of a term (but see author examples below).
- Grouping
- Grouping can be done with parentheses
Binary Booleans are not associative - parentheses are mandatory if a field has multiple Booleans
First two fields are grouped together in form before third field is added in - Exact phrases
- Use double quotes (") - Warning: can be slow (try AND instead)
- Hyphenated terms
- Hyphens have been removed from most phrases (domain-wall becomes domain wall). This is because use of hyphens is often inconsistent.
Hyphens have not been removed from e-print archive names, nor have then been removed when it would result in a single letter being left over: c-theorem remains hypenated and is searchable.
Try searching for domain AND wall or for "domain wall". The latter is more accurate, but can be much slower than the former. - Example author searches
- T Bhattacharya
- T Bhattacharya AND NOT (S R Sharpe OR Rajan Gupta)
- 'Bhatta*' is OK, but 'T Bhatta*' won't work (initials and '*' can't be used together)
- Example journal references
- "Phys Rev Lett"
- Year searches
- 'Past Year' overrides individual years
- Subject Classes
- Covers ACM-class and MSC-class