Search Information

Basic Search

To do a basic search, simply fill in the search form with the items of interest, and press the search button. This will find all items in the database that match any one of the form items. For instance, in the membership database, setting the name field to "Trick" and the company field to "Carnegie" will give all people named "Trick" and all people whose company field contains the word "Carnegie". In the bibliographic databases, setting the author to "trick" and the abstract to "network" will find all papers with either "trick" as the author or with the word "network in the abstract. You can change the search to be those who match all of the attributes by changing the default at the end of the form.If you do not want to limit your search to specific fields in the database, simply fill in the general search entry.

ACI Bibliographic and Conference Presentation Database Searches

The ACI Bibliographic and Conference Presentation Database Searches have the following characteristics/requirements:

• For all fields your search terms must be three or more characters long.
• All queries are case-insensitive. For example "smith" will match "Smith."

Boolean Operators

You may prefix search terms with operators that allow you to fine-tune your query. For example, prefixing a search word with a plus, as in +smith, will make that word required (logical AND). These operators determine a "relevance" score for the query, and query results are sorted by decreasing relevance by default. However, note that these operators function within fields; Using more than one field and setting the record matching option above to "at least one requested field (OR)" may override your use of operators in terms of finding matches. (Tip: To work around this, put all of your search terms into the "Keyword Search" or "Search on General Terms" fields, which search on all fields.) Operators may be combined. Following is the full list of operators:

• (no operator) - word is optional but relevance is increased if matched (applies by default)
• + (plus) - match returned only if word is present
• - (minus) - match returned only if word is not present
• ~ (tilde) - relevance is decreased if matched
• > (greater than) - increases relevance if matched (relative to <term)
• < (less than) - decreases relevance if matched (relative to >term)
• ( ) (parentheses) - group words into subexpressions, can be nested
• * (asterisk) - wildcard operator, only works appended to end of search word
• " (double quote) - phrase in doublequotes will be matches exactly (but not case-sensitive)

Checking AND will return all records which match all of the fields below (author, title, keywords etc.) that are specified, while checking OR will return all records which match at least one of the fields that are specified.