Combining Search Terms

Boolean Operators

The Boolean operators and, or, and not may be used to link search terms in any search field:

• and may be used to search for two or more terms appearing in the same document
• or may be used when you wish to search for any one of several terms in the same document
• not may be used to specifically exclude a term within a document.

Proximity Operator

The near proximity operator retrieves searched terms which appear in the same sentence, paragraph, or scheme. For example, near may be used to :

• link the author, journal title, and publication year of the same reference
• link structures and text, e.g. reaction conditions within the same scheme.

It is important to note that the first two search boxes are inextricably linked i.e., the first and second text box searches are performed first, then the third text box search will be combined with the hits from the first.

These operators may be used to link structure searches with text searches, in addition to linking text/text searches. A structure search may be combined with up to two text searches using the operators and, or, not, and near.

Wildcards

The wildcards *, ?, or ! may be used anywhere within a search term as a character substitution, or at the beginning or end in order to truncate the term.

• The asterisk * represents any number of characters, including zero.
• The question mark ? represents only one optional character, and therefore will produce hits for the core term and the core term plus one character.
• The exclamation mark ! represents one character.