Tips for keyword searching
- Not case sensitive
- Entering singular nouns will also search for plural nouns and possessives as long as you don't put quotation marks around the word.
- Entering either British or American spellings (tumor or tumour) will search for both variations as long as you don't put quotation marks around the word or use it with the wildcards * ? or $
Double quotes “ “ will search for exact phrases. They also mean that Web of Science won't search for plurals or differences in spellings e.g. "tumor" will not also find tumour or tumors.
- * replaces any number of letters, including no character e.g. comput* will find computer, computes, computational etc., *oxide will find hydroxide, monoxide, dioxide etc. and p*ediatric will find paediatric or pediatric.
- Only right-hand truncation (such as oxid*), not left-hand truncation (*oxide), is supported when you use other wildcards (* $ ?)
- For either right or left hand truncation you need to have a minimum of three letters in your stem.
- ? replaces only one character e.g. wom?n will find women and woman / “baby t??th” will search for “baby tooth” and “baby teeth”
- $ represents either 1 or 2 characters e.g. p$ediatric will find paediatric or pediatric.
You need to be in Advanced Search to use proximity searching. You can't use NEAR with the All Fields search so change the drop down menu to Topic (will search title, abstract and author keywords.)
NEAR/n Restricts the number of words between the two words, the word order is not set e.g. pollution NEAR/3 cars finds examples where there can be up to three words in between such as pollution in seven passenger cars, pollution caused by cars, car pollution etc
NEAR without the /n will find records where the terms are within 15 words of each other.
SAME is only used when searching for an address to restrict your search to terms that appear in the same address within a Full Record e.g. Imperial SAME Trust
