Introduction
When searching for an article, the more specific your search, the faster it will run and the more likely it will return the actual article(s) of interest to you. For best results, enter the minimum amount of information necessary to uniquely identify the article or articles, such as volume/page number, authors and/or specific key words. Specific hints and tools for successful and specialized searching are described in individual sections of this help.
General Rules
There are three types of searches, with 8 search fields available:
• Specify Citation--year, volume, page
• Specify DOI (if the content contains DOIs)
• Specify Author, Keywords--author (2), title, abstract+title, text+abstract+title
If a search uses multiple fields, they are joined by AND in the search. Example: Author: Darwin AND Title: Species. In other words, search results must match both criteria.
Within each field of a Keywords search, multiple words are, by default, joined by AND (i.e., the "all" button to the right of the field). Example: Title: Applied Physics is treated as a search for articles with titles having both Applied AND Physics (not necessarily next to each other). Use the "any" button next to the search fields to change this to OR (Applied OR Physics), or use the "phrase" button to change this to an exact phrase ("Applied Physics"). Boolean operators may also be used within the Keywords fields.
The Order of Displayed Results
Search results are listed in order of "relevance." In general, this means that articles which contain the greatest number of the search terms in the greatest frequency will be listed first. In practice, this means that if you enter "signal transduction" into the "Words anywhere in article" box, the search engine will find all articles which include either the term signal or the term transduction, but will list any which use both terms before any which use only one or the other, and will list articles which use the terms more frequently before those which use them less. Articles in which the word appears in the Title/Abstract are listed before articles containing the term(s) only in the text.
Main Search Strategies
Extra Benefits of Full-Text Searching
Additional Search Information
Search Errors