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Course documents: Week 2

Advanced query building

How to create successful and complete search queries that give you an understanding of the scope of your research interest and provide you with all the relevant literature you need for your thesis and/or internship.

You can find a description below on how to use the different operators and wildcards for Web of Science and Google Scholar. We also have some extra tips for Reaxys and search tips for other databases.

Reaxys

Sugars: ADFruc,BDfruct etc. Check the PDF above for all Abbreviated groups.

Substituents
The use of 'exact substituents' in Atom Properties does not work well. Reaxys is aware of the problem and looking into this. Instead, use Smax or Slock on the left menu bar.

Translating your query to different search engines/databases

Web of Science

Operators

AND, OR & NOT

alcohol NEAR/x abuse both terms are maximum x words apart from each other. This way “The abuse of alcohol…” is included as well, but irrelevant hits, i.e. about general abuse where the word alcohol is mentioned somewhere, are avoided.

Wildcards

* (asterisk): 0 or more characters.

Example: synthe* à gives synthesis, syntheses, synthesize, synthesise, synthetic etc.

? (question mark): 1 character

Example: organi?ation à gives organisation and organization

$ (dollar sign): 0 or 1 character

Example: colo$r à gives color and colour

Remark: minimum of 3 characters necessary! Not se*  but sea*.

Quotation marks

 “blood stain pattern” à searches for these exact  words, in this exact order

Further explanation search operators

Further explanation advanced search

 

Base Web of Science query

pH:

Acidity OR pH OR pOH OR “hydrogen ion *” OR “hydrogen ion*”

Diastatic power

“Degrees linter” OR “diastatic power” OR “diastatic *” OR diastatic OR alpha-amylase OR beta-amylase OR “Limit Dextrinase” OR Windisch-Kolbach

Mash

Mash OR mashbill OR grainbill OR “grain bill” OR “extract potential” OR efficiency OR effectiveness OR productivity

 

Google /Google Scholar /google books/Google patents

Boolean operators

AND and OR, no NOT

Instead of OR, the ‘pipe’ | (straight line) can be used, without spaces: virus|viruses, the AND operator is a space in Google.

 

Converting the Web of Science query into Google

Replace the OR and AND operators with a pipe and a space. Remove any truncation symbols as they do not work in Google.

 

Acidity|pH|pOH|“hydrogen ion”

“Degrees linter”|“diastatic power”|diastatic|alpha-amylase|beta-amylase|“Limit Dextrinase”|Windisch-Kolbach

Mash|mashbill|”mash bill”|grainbill|“grain bill”|“extract potential”|efficiency|effectiveness|productivity

 

Example intitle:

Intitle search allows you to only search in the title of the documents you find.

 

Intitle:Acidity|pH|pOH|“hydrogen ion”

Intitle:“Degrees linter”|“diastatic power”|diastatic|alpha-amylase|beta-amylase|“Limit Dextrinase”|Windisch-Kolbach

Intitle:Mash|mashbill|”mash bill”|grainbill|“grain bill”|“extract potential”|efficiency|effectiveness|productivity

 

Example around operator

This proximity operator only works 'downstream' of the text you are searching. In the case below diastatic power has to be within 15 words of pH.

 

pH AROUND/15 “diastatic power” AROUND/15 mash

 

Example source

Use source to only search in specific journals

 

diastatic|alpha-amylase|beta-amylase|“Limit Dextrinase” source:chemistry

 

You can also search for datasets in google

Example dataset

sugar synthesis

 

You can find more Google field codes in the pdf below.