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| Search Tips |
Dialog offers several resources designed to help you use our products and
features effectively, including online
support, phone support and
search tips found below.
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- Enter Only What You Need
Use only the search options that you need-leave the others blank.
- Upper or Lower Case
You can type uppercase or lowercase letters. Capitalization is ignored.
- Word Endings
For different word endings, use the ? wildcard. For example: CANCER?
to find cancer, cancers, cancerous, etc.
Be careful about using the wildcard with short words: you might get
more words than you want. For example, CAT? finds cat and cats, but
also catalytic, catalog, categories, etc. Use CAT OR CATS for better
results.
- Alternate Spellings
For alternate spellings, use the ? wildcard. For example: WOM?N to find woman, women, or womyn
Internal truncation such as this works for words that alter in spelling by a single letter. For example, COL?R would get color, but not colour.
- Exact Matches
When searching keywords, subject words, words in title, or company
names, the system automatically looks for variations on phrases that
you enter. For example, AIR FILTER? will find air filter, air filters,
and filtering the air. If you want an exact match for a phrase, you
can enter hyphens between the words. For example, AIR-FILTER? will
find air filter and air filters, but not filtering the air.
- Non-searchable Characters
A few special characters are not searchable, such as @, #, $, &,
*, !, +.
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- You can use parentheses ( ) and logical connectors AND, OR, and NOT
to combine search words.
- Use AND to find articles containing ALL of the words:
INTERNET AND ADVERTIS? AND JAPAN finds articles that mention advertising
on the Internet in Japan.
- Use OR to find articles containing AT LEAST ONE of the words:
CANCER? OR NEOPLASM? finds articles that contain one or more of these
words. Typically, you use OR between synonyms or words with alternate
spellings.
- Use NOT to EXCLUDE articles that contain selected words:
BULLS NOT CHICAGO BULLS finds articles about bulls, but excludes articles
that mention the Chicago Bulls basketball team.
- Use Parentheses to group words together when you use different
connectors:
(KIDNEY OR RENAL) AND TRANSPLANT? finds articles mentioning either
kidney transplants or renal transplants. Without parentheses, AND is
processed before OR.
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- Don't over-specify: use only the search options you really
need-leave the others blank.
- Exclude "implied concepts": leave out words like
research or effects.
- Check for misspelled words
- Check the format of your entry: follow the Search Tips examples
shown on the search page. Some search options require specific spacing
and/or punctuation for correct results.
- Use more wildcards to search different word endings.
- Check that you are using parentheses correctly when you combine
words with AND, OR, NOT.
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