Help: How to Specify your Search Terms

• General Information
• How to search for several words at once
• How to use AND, OR and NOT
• How to use parentheses
• How to use wildcards

General Information
Searching is case-insensitive, so that a search for fusion will find all articles containing "fusion" "Fusion ", or "FUSION". The AND, OR and NOT operators are also case-insesitive; hence plasma AND fusion is interpreted in the same way as plasma OR fusion.

How to search for several words at once
The system can search for several words at once. This is treated as implying the OR operator between the words. So the search plasma fusion is treated as plasma OR fusion.

You can also search for phrases. This means that you can search for groups of words that occur in a specific order with intervening words. To search for a phrase, enclose your terms in double quotes (i.e. "search phrase"). So the search "plasma fusion" will be treated as plasma AND fusion with no words in-between.

How to use And, OR and NOT
The operators AND, OR and NOT can be used to define the relationship between search terms. For example:

• plasma AND fusion finds articles containing both "plasma" and "fusion".
• plasma OR fusion finds articles containing "plasma" "fusion" or both.
• plasma NOT fusion finds articles in which the word "plasma" appears, but the word "fusion" does not.

• (nuclear OR atomic) AND fusion.
• plasma OR (nuclear AND atomic).

To search for a group of characters containing parentheses, the group must be surrounded by double quotes.

How to use wildcards
The character "*" can be used as a wildcard, taking the place of several unspecified characters. This allows you to broaden a search. Thus electr* finds articles containing electro, electron, electronic, electromagnetic etc.

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