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Searching All Fields Field

• Enter topic terms to search the following fields within a record:
• Topic (Title, Abstract, Keywords, Keywords Plus)
• Author, Editor, Corporate Author, Group Author
• Author Identifier
• Publication Name
• DOI
• Publication Year
• Address
• Organization-Enhanced
• Conference
• Language
• Document Type
• ISSN 
• Funding Agency
• Funding Text 
• Grant Number
• Accession Number
• PubMedID
• Enter search terms in any order. For example, you can type radioactive decay 2014 Drexel or  2014 drexel decay radioactive and see the same number of search results.
• To search for an exact phrase, put the term in quotations: "radioactive decay"
• Use wildcards (* $ ?) to find plural and inflected forms of words.
• Use search operators (AND, OR, NOT) to indicate a relationship between terms. 

Important: the All Fields search field does not support the SAME and NEAR operators.

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Implicit AND Operator

Web of Science search uses an implicit AND operator in most fields when you enter two or more adjacent terms. For example, typing rainbow trout fish farm in an All Fields search is equivalent to typing rainbow AND trout AND fish AND farm; both queries render the same number of results.

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Search Rules

• Search fields are not case sensitive, so for example, AIDS, Aids, and aids return the same number of results.
• Enzym* matches enzyme, enzymes, enzymatic, and enzymology.
• Sul*ur matches sulfur and Sulphur.
• Vitamin D matches vitamin D.Records with the word vitamin and the letter D anywhere in the searched fields also appear in the search results.
• There is a 50-term limit for an All Fields query. 

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Right and Left-Hand Truncation

• Only right-hand truncation (such as oxid*), not left-hand truncation (*oxide), is supported when you use wildcards (* $ ?) in the All Fields search field. 

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

• The queries *oxide or  *oxid* are not supported and generates an error message.

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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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Lemmatization and Quotation Marks

The product does not retrieve synonyms and lemmatized terms when you enclosed your search terms in quotation (" ") marks. For example:

• "mouse" finds records that contain the word mouse but not mice.
• "color" finds records that contain the word color but not colour.

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Lemmatization and Wildcards

The product turns off lemmatization when search terms are used with wildcards. For example, color* finds records that contain the words color, colors, and colorful but not colour, colours, and colourful.

To find all variants of a term, enter both terms using a wildcard separated by the OR operator. For example, color* OR colour* finds both variants.

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Lemmatization and Too Many Search Terms

The product turns off lemmatization when your English language search query exceeds the number of terms allowed in a search. When you exceed the limit, the product returns only exact matches.

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Using Formulas when Searching 

Do not separate alphanumeric characters when entering a formula in your search query.

For example, performing a search using the query KxFe2-ySe2 returns multiple results including the title called "The electron pairing of KxFe2-ySe2".

You may use quotation marks in your query. For example, "KxFe2-ySe2" will return the same records as KxFe2-ySe2.

Important: Do not use a space between the alphanumeric characters in a query. A query such as K x Fe 2-y Se 2 will return fewer (and unpredictable) results than KxFe2-ySe2. It is the same as entering K AND x AND Fe AND 2-y AND Se AND 2. The query “K x Fe 2-y Se 2" will not return any results.

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Search Examples

• "Water consumption" finds records containing the exact phrase water consumption.

• Water AND consumption finds records containing the words water and consumption. The two words may appear in the same Topic field or they may appear in different fields.

• Water AND consum* finds records containing the words water, consume, consumed, consumer, consumption, and so on.

• Water OR consumption finds records containing either water or consumption or both words.

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Implied AND Operator

The product uses an implicit AND operator when you enter two or more adjacent terms in most fields.

For example, the title search rainbow trout fish farm is equivalent to rainbow AND trout AND fish AND farm -- both queries return the same number of results.

Note: Implied AND does not apply to Chinese-language search queries.

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Using Quotation Marks

Use quotation marks to find exact phrases and to turn off lemmatization and the product's internal synonym finder. For example:

• "soil drainage" finds soil drainage, but not drainage of soil.

• "mouse" finds mouse, but not mice.

• "color" finds color, but not colour.

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Spelling Variations

The product automatically finds spelling variations (such as U.S. and U.K. spelling differences) in Topic and Title search terms.

For example, if you enter color in the Title field, the product finds all records that contain the term color and/or colour in the article title.

To turn off the this feature, enter a term using quotation marks ( "" ). For example:

• Color AND Bird* AND Gene* finds all articles that contain the terms color or colour and bird, birds, gene, and genes.

• "Color" AND Bird* AND Gene* finds only articles that contain the term color, bird, birds, gene, and genes.

Click the link for a list of synonyms.