Power Searching

Introduction

Our normal search allows for simple searching and is designed for more natural languages searches. It is available free for all users.

Our Power Search is a full-fledged boolean search tool and is available to subscribers only. It allows you to enter full searches using full boolean syntax. Note that as a result it is less forgiving than our normal search — incorrectly entered search requests will result in a note that your query was invalid.

Therefore, it is important to know the correct syntax when searching using the Power Search tool

Syntax

The syntax used is similar to those of standard boolean search engines.

If you enter a search plain, without any operators, the search engine will match all records that match any of the words. So

would match all records with the word "learning" as well as all records with the word "systems".

The different features are listed below.

Limiting Fields

You can limit which parts of a record are searched by specify the field in the format fieldname:term. For example,

would return only records that contained gaming in the title of the record.

would return only records where one or more of the authors of the record are named Smith.

Supported Fields

LearnTechLib supports searching against the following fields:

• title: to search the title (also can pull up journal or conference records with matching titles)
• abstract: to search only in the abstract of the paper (matches papers only)
• description: search in abstract or description of record (matches papers as well as journals/conferences)
• author: search in the author names. To search a full name, using proximity is recommended (e.g. author:"John Smith"~1)
• has_full_text:true limits results only to records that include the full text document.
• pub_type: limits type of record returned. Allowed values are article, proceedings, dissertation, thesis, talk, ebook, or report.

Wildcards, Fuzzy Matching, and Regular Expressions

Wildcards allow you to search for spelling variations on a given word (e.g. biolog* to match biology, biological, etc).

There are two wildcard operators, ? and *.

? matches a single character and * matches zero or more characters. So

would match university as well as its variant in many other languages such as università, universite, and universiti.

would match all the terms above as well as longer words such as universities or universitaire

Fuzzy matching allows you to perform searches where the 1-2 characters in the word may be switched or changed. This is most useful to find terms that may be misspelled:

learning~

would match learning but also misspellings like laerning or learing

AND, OR, NOT, and grouping

The standard boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT. The AND operator indicates that all terms or groups must be in the matching documents, while OR means that at least one term should match.

would match records that contain both terms, while

would match records that mention 3d, gaming, or both.

The NOT operator instructs the search engine to exclude records that match the next term.

would return all records that mention 3d, but only if they do not contain the term gaming.

Grouping allows you to combine terms into multiple boolean searches.

would return records that feature the term mathematics and could contain 3d or gaming or both.

Grouping can use as much nesting as you'd like:

Using + or -

In addition to using AND, OR, and NOT to control your search, you can also use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs as well.

When using this syntax, + means the term must be included, - means the term must not be included. If a term has no symbol preceding it, that means it is optional — its presence will increase the relevance of that match, but is not required.

Note that there are some differences in the various syntaxes. For example, in

all matches would have to contain the term 3d and exclude the term gaming, but may or may not contain either learning or education. Meanwhile

would result in records that contained 3d, excluded the term gaming, but did contain either learning, education, or both. Articles without either of those terms would not match. Keep this in mind when using the different formats.

Phrase Searching

In addition to one-word terms, you can include entire phrases by wrapping them in quotes. Without quotes

would return all records mentioning either mobile or learning, while

would return only records that feature the words "mobile learning" next to one another in order.

Proximity Searching

Proximity searching is similar to phrase searching, but allows for the presence of words in a different order or with other words in between.

It uses the same syntax as a phrase, but is followed by a tilde (~) and the number of words allowed between each term.

means at most one word can appear between the two words. "interactive environments"~1 could match records that contained "interactive learning environments", "interactive virtual environments", "interactive computer environments", etc.

would match all of the records above as well as records containing phrases like "interactive media in museum environments" or "interactive visual learning environments".