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APS » Journals » Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research » Searching

Searching

How to search

Searching on PRST-PER is still a work in progress; however, it is quite useful in its current form. All articles in PRST-PER have their titles, author names, PACS, and abstracts indexed.

Searching can be restricted to particular fields such as titles, authors, abstracts, and full text. The searchable fields are listed on the search page. To search PRST-PER, just fill in the blanks for the fields that you want to search and click on the "Run Search Query" button. You can restrict searches to particular years by making the appropriate selection. Fields are AND'ed together by default.

Search syntax and Boolean operators

The search engine has several features for making searches more precise. Searches are case insensitive.

  • Boolean operators OR and AND: You can use OR and AND to join together search terms. A blank space between two terms is considered an OR by default.
    Example: two dimensional will match records that have either the word two or the word dimensional in them.
    two AND dimensional will only match if the record contains both the word two and the word dimensional.
  • The Boolean NOT can be prepended to a phrase to only match records which don't contain the phrase.
    Example: two NOT dimensional would match a record that had the word two and not the work dimensional.
  • Parentheses, i.e., '(' and ')', can be used to group terms or phrases together to build up more complicated searches.
    Example: (two AND dimensional) NOT threewould exclude articles with the phrase three dimensional in it.
  • Double quotation marks (") can be used to override the intepretation of a blank as OR. Instead, the quoted phrase is treated as an exact phrase to be matched.
    Example:"two dimensional" would force the search to only match if the word two and the word dimensional occurred together. It would not match "Dimensional reduction from two points of view."
  • An asterisk (*) can be appended to the end of a search term to match all extensions of the term. Note that asterisks cannot be used as a wildcard match in any position but at the end of a word. Many times a wildcard isn't necessary because of stemming.
    Example: dime* would match dimer as well as dimension.

Searching for authors (initials and all that)

Special care has been taken to make it easy to search for author names. In many cases, just searching on an author's last name is sufficient. However, it is often necessary to restrict the search by adding a first name or initials. To handle this, there is a special syntax for entering author names in the Author(s) search field. Surnames are entered first and any additional names or initials are then appended, separated by commas. For example, to search for papers by Homer J. Simpson, one would enter Simpson,Homer,J. Since authors often have their names appear differently in different publications, it is probably better to start with a more general search such as Simpson,H. This will also match Harvey Simpson. Note that the periods shouldn't appear when you use initials. Some people write their names with their surname, or family name, first. Unfortunately, we can't readily distinguish this case from the Western custom. For this index, a "surname" means whichever name is last. If a last name has a space in it, put an underscore in place of the space: de_Graff,J for example. Also, some names are inconsistetly tagged, with, for example, "van" sometimes not being part of the surname. When searching on names like this, it may be desirable to search also for the name without the "van",(van_Druten OR Druten).

Many author names have accented characters in their names. You can search for such an author by dropping the accent from the character.

Searching for words with accented characters and hyphens

Hyphens have been removed before indexing, so to search for a hyphenated word, use "two dimensional" (note that the quotes are important) instead of two-dimensional. The only exception to this rule is in the case when dropping the hyphen would create a word with only a single letter, such as for x-ray or type-I. In these cases, search using the hyphenated form of the word.

All accented characters have had their accents removed.

Stemming

Stemming is a technique to make searches faster (by keeping indexes smaller) and to provide some convenience when searching for words which appear with multiple suffixes. For instance, if you search for 'superconductor', you will also get hits for superconducting, superconductors, etc. This is a two-edged sword though. The stemmer isn't 100% accurate and so terms can disappear from the index because they stem to very common words or you may be surprised by some matches.