Advanced Search Query Builder

You can return more relevant search results using our advanced search query builder. To open it, click Advanced Search from the Document Search page.

Screen image of advanced search link.png

  1. Select a field to search, type a search term, and click Add to Query.
  2. After adding your first term, you can select a Boolean operator from the drop-down menu or type one in the Query Preview text box before adding additional search terms.

screen image of query preview

Exact Search

Clicking More Options opens Exact search. It is turned off by default and uses stemming and lemmatization to expand your search just as it does when you perform a Document search. For example, if you type mouse in the search field, Web of Science will return results that contain the words mouse and mice.

When Exact search is turned on, your search is limited to the exact term you type in the search field. So, if you search mouse, the search only returns records that include the word mouse.

Note: To perform an exact search on a phrase, place the phrase between quotation marks

Copy Query Link and Remove

You can copy the query link or remove the query from the list by clicking the three dots next to the number of results:

Scrceen capture of copy link and remove query

Expand the list of field tags to see the label for each one. Field tags help you search specific information in the Web of Science database. You can read the description for field tags by clicking one of the following links our Web of Science collections.

Each search query you build is saved as a set under History on the advanced search page. Sets are identified by numbers, and the most recent sets appear at the top of the list.

Screen capture of Advanced Search History Section

To combine queries:

  1. Click Add to Search next to the first query you want to combine.

Screen capture combine search query

  1. Click Add to Search next to additional queries you want to combine. You will need to select the appropriate Boolean operators from the available list before adding the query.

Screen capture of boolean operators for combining sets

You can edit a saved search query by clicking Edit:

Screen capture edit link for search query

 

From the edit window, you can save the updated query or save it as a new set:

Screen capture of saving query as new set