Search Tips

Koori DrugInfo Library Search

The ‘Search all fields’ box is a very good place to start as it searches title, subject and author fields.

Words and phrases

To search for words or phrases, type the term you want to find eg. inhalants or a phrase eg. dual diagnosis. The system will search for those words in the order you have stated them.

To find all the variations of a particular word stem, follow the word stem with an asterisk, eg. counsel* will find counsel, counselling, counseling, counsellor and counsellors.

Terms can be combined by using the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. These are represented by &, / and !. Include a space before and after these symbols.

The table below shows examples of some of the searching methods that will help you to find exactly what you are looking for.

Type this	to find this
dual diagnosis	Records including this phrase, ie. those words, in that order.
foetal alcohol / fetal alcohol / FAS	Records containing any of these terms or spellings.
drugs & women	Records containing both of these terms.
drugs p3 workplace	Records containing drugs, preceding workplace by three words or fewer.
advertising w5 alcohol	Records containing advertising within five words, before or after, alcohol.

Words joined by &, / and ! are searched in order from left to right. To control this, brackets can be used, as terms within brackets will be evaluated first. eg. women & (indigenous/aboriginal).

Try to think of a range of terms that may have been used, not only as subject headings, but also in the title or abstract for an item. These can be separated with a / to retrieve all relevant items. See the foetal alcohol syndrome example in the table above.

Searching for particular dates

To find items published in a particular year, or span of years, the date field at the bottom of the Advanced Search screen can be used. To find an item published in a particular year, simply type the year in the box. eg. 2002.

To find a range of years the symbols /, <, >, : and = may be used, as shown in the table below.

symbol	meaning	example
<	Less than (before)	<2002 finds items published before 1 Jan 2002 .
<=	Less than or equal to	<= 2003 finds items published in, or before 2003.
>	Greater than (after)	> 2000 finds items published after 31 December 2000 .
>=	Greater than, or equal to	>= 2000 finds items published in, or after 2000.
:	Between	2000:2004 will find items published from the start of 2000 to the end of 2004.
/	Or	2003/2004 will find items published in either 2003 or 2004.

Stop words

To increase the speed of search times, our catalogue does not index extremely common words. These words are called “stop words”. The stop words for our catalogue are:

a, an, and, by, for, from, in, of, on, the, to, with.

These words can be omitted from the start of your search phrase.

Droplist

Our catalogue includes a droplist for the field, Record Type. Click on the droplist arrow to open the list, and select one of the record types to narrow your search, eg. “video”.

You can clear your selection by opening the list again and selecting the blank line at the top of the list.

Displaying the records after a search

A successful search will find one or more records matching your search criteria. These records will be displayed as a report.

The underlined title of the item is a link to the full record for that particular item. Click on this link to find more detailed information about the item, such as location, keywords and often, an abstract.

Back on the report page, you can move to the next, or previous, 20 records by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page.

Clicking on the request check box to the left of each item will allow you to make an email request for that item, which will go directly to the library after you have added your details.

Remember that journal articles will incur a cost.

Troubleshooting

Here are some examples of common problems faced by searchers, and some simple solutions to help you find what you are looking for.

I got the message “Unable to recognise as a correctly formed query”.

The program cannot understand the search criteria you have entered. Check for:

• Typographical errors
• Single quotation marks or brackets
• Boolean search symbols at the end of the search phrase

If these suggestions don’t help, begin with a simpler search, and gradually narrow the search by adding more specific search criteria.

I found too many records.

• Narrow the search by limiting records to a particular time span or record type.
• If you used an asterisk, try leaving it out, and instead, type in one of the terms in full.
• You could also use Boolean operators to exclude particular terms.

I didn’t find any records.

• Check your spelling. Be particularly careful with words that may have American spellings, such as counseling. An asterisk can be used to allow a variety of spellings to be considered.
• Make sure you have put a space on either side of any Boolean operators you have used.

 Still having trouble finding what you need?

If you need further advice to find exactly what you need, contact the Drug Info library on library@adf.org.au and we will be happy to help you with your search.

Search technology supplied by Inmagic, Inc. http://www.inmagic.com .