SUNScholar/Search Tips

What is searched in the general keyword search (Simple Search)?

The word(s) you enter in the search box will be searched against the title, author, creator, subject, abstract, series, sponsor, type, coverage and identifier fields of each item's record. Searches are not case sensitive, e.g. searches for "engine" and "Engine" will retrieve the same hits.

Truncation and stemming

Please note that the search engine uses stemming which means that you will get a match for all words with the same stem. For example, when searching for "selection" you will also find "selected" and "selecting". If you wish to search for a particular stem please use the asterisk (*) after a word stem to get all hits having words starting with that root e.g. select*.

What is not searched in the general keyword search (Simple Search)?

Stop Words The search engine ignores certain words that occur frequently in English, but do not add value to the search. These are:

"a", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such", "the", "to", "was".

Phrase Searching To search using multiple words as a phrase, put quotation marks (") around the phrase e.g. "supply chain relationships".

Exact word match Put a plus (+) sign before a word if it MUST appear in the search result. For instance, in the following search the word "training" is optional, but the word "dog" must be in the result: training+dog. Please note that the search engine will always use stemming.

Eliminate items with unwanted words Put a minus (-) sign before a word if it should not appear in the search results. Alternatively, you can use NOT. This can limit your search to eliminate unwanted hits. For instance, in the search "training-cat" or "training NOT cat" you will get items containing the word "training", except those that also contain the word "cat".

Boolean searching

The following Boolean operators can be used to combine terms. Note that they must be CAPITALIZED!

AND - to limit searches to find items containing all words or phrases combined with this operator, e.g. "cats AND dogs" will retrieve all items that contain BOTH the words "cats" and "dogs".

OR - to enlarge searches to find items containing any of the words or phrases surrounding this operator "cats OR dogs" will retrieve all items that contain EITHER the words "cats" or "dogs".

NOT - to exclude items containing the word following this operator, e.g. "cats NOT dogs" will retrieve all items that contain the word "training" EXCEPT those also containing the word "cat".

Parentheses can be used in the search query to group search terms into sets, and operators can then be applied to the whole set, e.g. "(cats OR dogs) AND (training OR discipline)"