HighWire Press -- SRU Search

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SRU@HighWire

SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) is a standards-based search protocol for Internet search queries, using CQL (Common Query Language). Using SRU, clients may search for articles at HighWire and receive the results from such a query in XML. For more information on SRU, please see the SRU Standards page.

The HighWire SRU service currently implements Explain and SearchRetrieve operations and supports SRU Level 0 query syntax.

Explain Requests
The basic explain request, as shown below, requires two mandatory params - version & operation:

http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/sru?version=1.1&operation=explain

SearchRetrieve Requests
SearchRetrieve operations allow users to search for articles hosted by HighWire and is the heart of the SRU service. SearchRetrieve operations require the version and operation parameters and also accept the query and startRecord parameters which allows a user to search for terms and page through the result list. An example SRU search for the word "dog" is shown below.

http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/sru?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=dog&startRecord=&sendit=Search

Field-specific queries

HighWire also supports field specific queries for title, abstract, author and year of publication. To perform a field-specific search, construct your search as shown below:

Author search for "J Smith" is done with query=dc.creator+=%22J+Smith%22
Title search for "smoking+cessation" is done with query=title+=%22smoking+cessation%22
Title and Abstract search for "glaucoma" is done with query=dc.description+=%22glaucoma%22
Publication Year search for 2005 is done with query=date+=%2005%22