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Searching the Topic Field

Enter Topic terms to search the following fields within a record.

• Title
• Abstract
• Author Keywords

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Topic Terms in Arabic

The search الطاقة finds records that contain the word الطاقة

Enter multiple words with or without the AND operator. The following searches are equivalent:

• الطاقة
• الطاقة المتجددة 

Use search operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, SAME) to prescribe a relationship between terms such as equivalence, exclusion or proximity.

Topic Terms in English

The search electrophoresis finds records that contain the word electrophoresis.

Enter multiple words with or without the AND operator. The following searches are equivalent:

• heavy water
• water heavy

To search for an exact phrase in English, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. Example: "heavy water"

Use wildcards (* $ ?) to find plural and inflected forms of words.

Use search operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, SAME) to prescribe a relationship between terms such as equivalence, exclusion or proximity.

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Right and Left-hand Truncation

You can use right and left-hand truncation when using wildcards (* $ ?) for searching All Fields.

You must enter at least three characters after a wildcard when using left-hand truncation and three characters before a wildcard when using right-hand truncation. For example:

• The query *oxide matches terms such as peroxide, sulfoxide, nitric oxide, and zinc oxide.

• The query oxid* matches terms such as oxidation, oxidative, and oxidizing.

• The query *oxid* matches terms such as antioxidant, dioxide, oxidative, and polyphenoloxidase.

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Lemmatization

Web of Science automatically applies lemmatization rules to search queries. Lemmatization reduces inflected forms of a word to their lexical root. With lemmatization turned on, a search term is reduced to its "lemma" and inflected forms of the word are retrieved. As a result, lemmatization can reduce or eliminate the need to use wildcards to retrieve plurals and variant spellings of a word.

For example:

• cite finds inflected forms of the word cite, such as citing, cites, cited and citation.
• defense finds spelling variants such as defense and defence

Lemmatization applies only to English-language search terms.

Stemming

Web of Science also applies stemming rules to search queries. Stemming removes suffixes such as -ing and -es from words in a search query in order to expand the search and to retrieve additional, relevant records. For example, a Title search for vinyl recording will find articles with the term vinyl record.

Stemming and lemmatization are closely related. The difference is that stemming merely drops suffixes such as -ing and -es, while lemmatization makes use of dictionaries that define pairs and clusters (e.g., defense, defence) of words with the same meaning or with a shared morphological structure.

Both lemmatization and stemming apply only to English language search terms.

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