Search Tips

Basic searching

A single term search involves a single word such as geology or patent.

A phrase search is a group of words surrounded by double quotes. These words must appear together, such as "Trenton River".

Search by Publication Year

To restrict result to articles published in a range of years, enter the first and last year of the time period in the YEAR fields.

Boolean Searches. AND, OR and NOT

Searches can be fine-tuned using AND, OR and NOT. These boolean operators must be used in capital letters. For example, unconventional AND horizontal will find a larger set of documents than "unconventional horizontal"

Wildcards ? and *

Two wildcards are useful on this site:

The ? operator acts as a single character wildcard. glaci?? will match glacier and glaciar but not glaciation

The * operator acts as a multiple character wildcard. seism* will match seismic, seismology, etc.

Fuzzy and Proximity Searches with ~

Fuzzy searching allows for a greater variety of spelling variations. Use the tilde symbol ~ at the end of a single word. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to roam use the fuzzy search. roam~ will find word such as foam and roams.

Proximity search uses the tilde symbol ~ at the end of a Phrase to find similar phrases. For example to search for a Prudhoe and field within 5 words of each other in a document use the search: "prudhoe field"~5. This will find Prudhoe Bay field, Prudhoe oil field, Prudhoe Bay oil field, etc.

+ Required Operator

The + operator also called the required operator requires that the term must exist somewhere in the field of a single document. To search for documents that must contain Calgary and may contain meeting use the query: +Calgary meeting.