Help with using advanced search
Use the Advanced search if you require the ability to build and save complex queries.
The advanced search is most often used by information professionals and researchers but there's no reason students, practitioners and others couldn't use it with a bit of knowledge and practice.
Field Tags
Using Advanced search
Searching for more than one term or word
Using truncation
Searching more than one field
Using a mixture of search operators
Limiting a search by publication date
Saving advanced searches
Field tags
Field tags allow you to search in specific fields (areas of the record) for words or terms. The current field tags supported by Social Care Online are:
| Free text: | freetext=" " |
| Title: | title=" " |
| Author: | author=" " |
| Topic: | topic=" " (view topics) |
| Editor: | editor=" " |
| Journal Title: | journaltitle=" " |
| Publisher: | publisher=" " |
| Publication Date: | publicationdate= |
| publicationdate> | |
| publicationdate< |
Search operators and, or, not can be used within fields and between fields.
Complex structured queries can be built up using truncation, brackets or parentheses.
Using Advanced search
- Decide where in a record you want to search for a particular term or phrase
- Select the relevant field tag from the list
- Type in your search query between the brackets of the field tag
- Select additional field tags as required. The fields will automatically be linked with the and operator but you can change this to or or not as required.
Note: when building any complex query ensure that you have added search operators in the correct order.
Searching for more than one term or word
An author search for publications written by Peter Beresford and Michael Turner would require the following search criteria:
author="beresford peter" and author="turner michael"
or
author="beresford p*" and author="turner m*"
View an example of this search and results.
Using truncation
Names and search terms can be truncated using the * symbol.
For example:
title="educat*"
This will search for titles including the words education, educating, educates, educational etc
View an example of this search and results.
Searching more than one field
To search for more than one field use 'and' operator:
title="what works" and topic="children"
View an example of this search and results.
Using a mixture of search operators
Use a mixture of search operators to build up a complex search
topic ="bullying” and (topic="children" or topic="school children" or topic="schools")
View an example of this search and results.
Limiting a search by publication date
Use the publication date operator to limit searches by a specific year or whether a date of publication is after or before certain year.
publicationdate= search on a specific year
publicationdate=> search everything after a year
publicationdate=< search everything before a year
Note: the date is entered after the operator i.e >2007
Note: Social Care Online has references that date back to 1986.
View an example of this search and results.
Saving advanced searches
To save a search query click on the 'Save' buttion beneath the search box. This will store and display a number of queries below the search box . You can use 'Add to search' to and allows you to add them back into the search box. This can be used to combine previous searches.
View an example of this search.