What is General Search?

It is one of the often used three search functions of Web of Science. Other two are:

• Cited Reference Search, which is the most unique of the database, and
• Advanced Search which we don't have time to cover now, but you may explore it based upon what we discuss today.

Use GENERAL SEARCH option to search for topics, authors, journals, and authors' addresses or affiliations.

How to Search?

It is how to fill in any or all of the four blank cells of Topic, Author, Journal, and Address, and bring up the documents to satisfy our information needs, normally using search operators and wildcards.

Topic and Search Operators

A word or phrase that might appear in the article title, abstract or keyword lists.
Select the Title only check box to restrict to article titles.

E.g.: public health AND mortality AND Japan.

Join multiple words or phrases with the search operators such as AND, OR, NOT, SAME (and SENT), plus parentheses ( ) and wildcards ?, *.

Search operators:

• Use AND to find records that contain all of your search words/phrases.
• Use OR to find records containing at least one of the search words/phrases. E.g.: birth OR fertility OR natality OR fecundity; terrorism OR anti-terrorism OR antiterrorism
• Use NOT to exclude records containing certain words from your search. E.g.: Asia NOT Japan.
• Use SAME to join the words/phrases within the title, keyword list, or same sentence of abstract for the record to be selected. E.g.: family planning SAME contraception.

Enter complete words/phrases or partial words/phrases using wildcards.
The question mark ? represents any single character. ? for 1 character, ?? for 2 characters.
The asterisk * represents any group of characters, including no characters, e.g.: sul*ur* for sulfur, sulphur, sulphuric, sulphurous, etc. Always no initial *.

When you're not sure about which word or phrase to fill, it's advisable to use search operator OR and asterisk * to include all possibilities.

Search operators, parentheses, wildcards can be used in Topic, Author, Title, and Addresses.

Author

An author/editor name with the last name first, followed by a space and up to five initials.

If you know initials in an author's first name, put an asterisk after the initial(s) (e.g., Gutmann A*, or Gutman* A*). You may enter last names without initials.

To have topic or other options filled to limit the searches to the right author, or browse one by one in the manageable list to find the right documents that you are looking for.

Source Title

A full or partial (truncated) source title. Click the source list to copy titles from the Full Journal Titles source list page. Better have the full title.

There are over two dozens of population demographic journals.

Address

An institution and/or place name from an author's address to search for records based on address. The institution and place names are frequently abbreviated in the ISI product. Refer to: Address Abbreviations; State and Country Abbreviations; Corporate and Institution Abbreviations for lists of abbreviated items.

E.g.:
Rep for Republic; Corp for Corporation; Inst for Institute; Univ for University; Acad for Academy; Lib for Library.

Set Search Limits

Restrict search by languages and document types so that your search needs will be met faster and more effectively.

Example: (Topic) Tienda M (Marta Tienda); English; Book Review.

General Search Example

I'd like to find research publications by Prof. Cecilia E. Rouse on student performance on different levels of education since 1990:

Choose databases of the first two databases; 1990-now;
Fill terms in: Topic: (educat* or school* or college or university) and (attainment or achievement); Author: Rouse C*
Results: 5 documents matched your query of the 12,631,000 in the data limits you selected.
Sort records by different ways: Latest Date, Relevance, etc.
Mark records
Print, save, email marked records. Saved files (in .txt or .html) are not easy to read.
Cited references
Times cited
Link to SFX full-text: Web of Science can offers full-text (indirectly) now because it is SFX activated. It means those journals that we can access full-text in a variety of databases can be linked directly from Web of Science individual records by clicking the SFX button. Sometimes more than one full-text source are linked. It should be noted that SFX is a new service of the university library, not all articles in full-text that we can access are linked. More full-text connections are to be added.

Related records:

• Based upon shared number of cited sources.
• Related Records are sorted from most relevant to least relevant.

One important point: For general search, one needs to start from Database and Date Limits page, so that the databases and years can be defined from there. Otherwise, previous chosen databases and years are used, which may not be what are wanted.

Conclusion

• General Search allows search using any of the four options of Topic, Author, Title, and Affiliation.
• Search operators AND, OR, NOT, SAME, plus parentheses ( ), wildcards of ? and *, particularly * should be used for more effective search.
• To make best use of it, we need to read the Help and Examples pages on Web of Science, and practice more, and maybe first by getting some unsatisfactory records.