HighWire Press

ASBMB News, May 2002
Keeping Track of All Those Searches

[In early 2001, ASBMB News introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press, which allows you to search all of Medline plus 340 journals' full-text at once. 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 ]

This month we take a step back from all the search and discovery features we've covered over the previous 13 articles in this series. In this article we look at how you can keep track of the different searches you've tried as you're exploring a new topic, and how you can most easily review them and refine them. Because subject/topic searching is an exploration process, rather than a direct "go to the article with this citation" process, you will often have a large number of "trial and error" searches. Along the way some will have been very productive and you might want to return to those and refine them. The HighWire portal supports this.

There are two links on every search result page that you will find handy when you want to review and refine your searches:

Search History

Rephrase My Search

Search History

The Search History tool shows you a list of all the searches you've done in the past two hours, from most recent to oldest. It lists the search criteria, and the search result size, as shown in the example here. You can click to bring a search result back (the "resubmit" button), or modify the search criteria (the "rephrase" button).

Rephrase My Search

The Rephrase tool will take the criteria you used in a search, and fill in the Advanced Search form with those criteria. You can then change the criteria - by adding or removing keywords, by changing date ranges, etc. - to refine your search after seeing what result you get. You might, for example, decide to change from the "all words" option to the "phrase" option, requiring that articles have a phrase exactly matching your criteria. Or you might see your result has a lot of 'chaff' in it and add a "NOT " on the search terms.

FIGURE 1

Give these simple tools a try as you explore subject/topic searches.

Previous issues of ASBMB Today covered topics about the new HighWire Portal. The articles are online at

http://highwire.stanford.edu/inthepress/asbmb/index.dtl