HighWire Press

ASBMB Today, July 2002
"Advanced Search": Get Just the Results You Need

[In the January issue, ASBMB Today introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press, which allows you to search all of Medline plus 330 journals' full-text at once -- including the JBC, of course! We began a monthly series of short articles highlighting tools or features of this new site for researchers' sore eyes. The new site is at http://highwire.stanford.edu ]

The new portal from JBC and HighWire Press provides for very easy searching right on the home page at http://highwire.stanford.edu. From this page you can search by author, search for words anywhere in an article, or quickly look up an article by its citation. Most searches can be done right from the home page.

But sometimes you want more precision in your searches, usually to avoid having to look through too many results. You can 'fine tune' your searches on the Advanced Search page, shown here (Figure 1). You reach this page by clicking on the SEARCH button on any page in the portal, or by clicking on the Advanced link next to Quick Search.

On the Advanced Search page you can do the following things:

  • Search for articles by two or more authors, not just one author
  • Search on words found specifically in the title or abstract, not just found anywhere in the text
  • Search only in particular journals you select from a list, not just all journals at HighWire or all journals in MEDLINE; you can also easily select some or all of the journals by publisher, by asking the system to show journals sorted by publisher first, which helps when a society publishes several related journals.
  • Search for articles published in a certain range of dates
  • Search only for reviews
  • Find articles containing any of the keywords you give, or all the keywords together in a phrase, not just all the words possibly scattered somewhere in the article (see the any, all and phrase radio-buttons next to the keyword-entry text boxes on the Advanced Search page).

In addition, from the Advanced Search page you can control the formatting of your search result:

  • Whether the results are full citations - about 5 lines per article, with full information - or condensed citations limited to two lines per article and having fewer links.
  • How many results are shown per page, from 10 (the default) to 150. Note that it does take longer to deliver a page of 150 items for viewing than for a page of 10 items.
  • Whether results are sorted to show the most recent articles first - which might show you articles with only one occurrence of your keyword ahead of articles that mention you keywords a dozen times - or the "best matches" first, which counts how many times your keywords are mentioned, to "rank" the article in your result. "Best matches" is the default.

All these options are easy to activate and control from the Advanced Search page.

Coming in the future we'll allow you to search by topic, in order to pick out (for example) articles in endocrinology without getting articles in immunology even when a keyword might be used in both fields.

Our past few issues of ASBMB Today have covered these topics about the new HighWire Portal:
March: Finding which articles are free is fast at the new portal
April: Tailoring a search result: amend, sort, condense, investigate and download search results.
May: Search and Track your Favorite Journals Easily
June: "Citation Search": Type Just Three Numbers to Get To Any Article
July: "Advanced Search": Get Just the Results You Need
Next month we'll look at Alerting capabilities in the new portal, through which you can have the system tell you when newly-published content matches a keyword or citation important to your research.