Help for SQL interface for complex searches in the Current Index to Statistics

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The interface on this query page is designed to support complex searches involving logical combinations of criteria. We are still developing this page and welcome your feedback and suggestions. Please send comments to the CIS question mailbox.

This query interface allows combination of up to 4 conditions using logical AND, OR, or NOT (meaning "and not") operators, together with the year and other limitations and options specified separately at the bottom of the form. There are also several special types of queries that make use of only the first text box; for these, the operators and other boxes are ignored.

1. Query restrictions that may be used in combination with others (standard searches)
2. Queries expressed using only the first box
3. Options and restrictions used with standard searches
4. Logical connectors and order of evaluation
5. Wildcards, exact matches, spacing, special characters (punctuation in names), accents

Query restrictions that may be used in combination with others (standard searches)

AUTHORS: The string entered is interpreted as the LEADING part of the string for a single author name, with surname (family name, "last" name) first. (Case, i.e. small and capital letters, is ignored.) If string is typed with no "extra" characters at the end, it will be treated as the beginning of the name and all names will be matched that match that beginning. A comma at the end terminates the name, forcing an exact match on the lastname. Any other character will cause a nonmatch. A lastname with first name or initial should be entered as "lastname, firstname" (with one space after the comma, but see spacing and wildcards).

Jeffers	Surname begins with Jeffers, including "Jeffers", "Jefferson", etc.
Jeffers,	Surname is exactly Jeffers
Jeffers, A	Includes "Jeffers, A.", but also "Jeffers, Alex" or "Jeffers, A. Fred"

ARTICLE/BOOK TITLE: This may a single word or a phrase that appears in the title of the article or book. If it is a phrase, it must appear exactly as entered (i.e., consecutive words without differences of punctuation). This does NOT include words appearing as keywords but not in the title.

TITLE/KEYWORD(S): This may a single word or a phrase that appears either in the title of the article or book or in the keywords. If it is a phrase, it must appear exactly as entered (i.e., consecutive words without differences of punctuation). The reason that both titles and keywords are included is that keywords are usually selected to avoid duplication with words appearing in the title, so a search on keyword alone would miss some relevant publications.

JOURNAL TITLE: This may be a single word or phrase appearing in the name of the journal. It restricts the search to articles appearing in the named journal. Note that by selecting only a journal title and a year restriction, you can effectively get a table of contents for a volume of a journal.

Warning: some conditions that retrieve a very large number of records will return incomplete results, even if the number of records that meet all of the conditions is small. This is because a temporary table with a size limit is created for each condition separately. Most commonly this would occur with a journal title search using a partial name (like "american") that matches several journals; use the full journal name in this situation. This limitation will be removed in a future update of the search software.

Queries expressed using only the first box

These options may be selected only for the first search field and cannot be used in combination with any other restriction (including year or type restrictions).

PARTIAL AUTHOR MATCH: This option is used to identify alternative spellings of author names using the leading characters, to determine the number of entries for each year for an author, and to obtain a bibliography for an author. The output from this type of query is a list of matching author names with years and (in parentheses) the number of items for each year. The year is a link, and if selected it returns that author's bibliography for the year. Note that because CIS lists author names exactly as they appear in the original publication, the same author may appear in several different forms (with initials, full name, nicknames, etc.). This option is useful for identifying such alternative forms. (For example, you may find "Jones, James", "Jones, J." and "Jones, J. K." which are alternative forms for the same author, as well as "Jones, John" who is a different author.)

PARTIAL KEYWORD MATCH: This option identifies keywords or keyphrases that match a given word, part of a word, or phrase. It can be used both for identifying keyphrases for searching, and also for finding keyphrases to be assigned for an article. Authors are encouraged to make use of this option when selecting keywords for their articles, to maintain consistency with phrases commonly used in previous literature.

JOURNAL COVERAGE: This option is used to count items for a journal by year, to assess the coverage of that journal. Enter all or part of the name of a journal. The output includes the full titles of the matching journals and a count by year. Click on a year to see the set of included items (full contents, for core journals) for that year.

JOURNAL ABBREVIATION: This option is used to find out the full journal name for an abbreviation used internally in the CIS database.

Options and restrictions used with standard searches

YEAR RESTRICTIONS: Starting or ending years, or both, may be entered. If left empty, the search assumes starting from the beginning of the database and ending with the most recent records. Enter years in 4-digit format, e.g. "1995".

TYPES OF ITEMS: Check or uncheck by clicking on boxes to include or exclude journal articles, books, proceedings, and E-journals.

OUTPUT FORMATS: Output from standard searches may be obtained in HTML, BibTeX (reference manager used with TeX/LaTeX), Tagged Text (used as input to some other reference manager programs) or Refer (like Tagged text but with different tags) formats. The HTML output is easiest to read, and may be printed or saved as HTML or text. Each author's name in the output is a link and may be selected to obtain the complete bibliography for that author (as spelled in the entry at hand). Also, the volume number of a journal article is a link to the contents of that journal volume. The others formats may also be saved or cut-and-pasted, and typically are used as input to other programs.

ORDER OF OUTPUT: Specify whether items are given in forward or backward chronological order.

Logical connectors and order of evaluation:

If more than one condition is given, the "Evaluation priority" checkoffs determine the order in which they are put together into a query. (In the following examples, words in ITALIC CAPITALS are set in the drop-down menus, or selector buttons for AND and OR, while those in "quotation marks" are typed into a text box.)

• AUTHOR="Jones" AND AUTHOR="Smith" will find articles with authors named Smith and Jones. (Authors "Jonestown" and "Smithfield" would also show up in this search. To avoid them, use authors "Smith," and "Jones,".)
• AUTHOR="Jones" OR AUTHOR="Smith" finds articles with at least one of those author names.
• AUTHOR="Jones" NOT AUTHOR="Smith" finds articles by Jones for which Smith is not a co-author.
• AUTHOR="Jones" AND JOURNAL="Royal" finds articles by Jones in journals with names including the word "Royal".
• AUTHOR="Jones" OR (FIRST) AUTHOR="Smith" AND TITLE="Maximum" finds articles with at least one of the named authors, and also the word "Maximum" in the title.
• AUTHOR="Jones" OR (FIRST) AUTHOR="Smith" AND TITLE="Maximum" OR (SECOND) TITLE="Entropy" finds articles with either Jones or Smith as author, and with either Maximum or Entropy in the title. Note that in this case, if the AND had been marked for evaluation first, you would get anything that had author Jones, "entropy" in the title, or author Smith with title word Maximum.

Wildcards, exact matches, spacing, special characters (punctuation in names), accents:

Wildcards: "Wildcards" can be used in most search fields. Two wildcard characters are recognized. The "%" sign (percent) matches any sequence of 0 or more characters. The "_" (underscore) matches any single character. Some examples of author searches:

• "Sm_th" matches "Smith", "Smyth", "Smoth"
• "Sm%th" matches "Smith", "Smyth", "Smoth" and also "Smyllyth", "Smth"
• "Jon%, A%T" matches "Jones, A. T.", "Jones, Alex Thomas", "Jonathan, Arthur T."

Exact matching: Most search fields assume by default that there is a wildcard match at the end (for names) or both beginning and end (for titles/keywords, journal names). This allows partial matches, e.g. "Smith," matches the last name Smith with any given names. The wildcard can be suppressed by using the "@" character at the appropriate end of the string (only implemented for author name matching). Thus, for example, "Smith, George" as an author name would match "Smith, George" and "Smith, George J.", but "Smith, George@" only matches exactly.

Spacing: The internal form of most text strings requires that there be a single space between words or after a comma, to make a match. To simplify entry and minimize errors, most entry fields are filtered to force them into that "normalized" format: sequences of more than one blank are reduced to a single blank, and a blank is inserted after a comma if needed. For "Partial Match" fields (Partial Author Name, Journal Coverage, Partial Keyword), this normalization is not performed, so special care should be taken in entering multi-word phrases in those queries.

Special characters (punctuation in names or titles): Some special characters, especially the apostrophe (O'Sullivan), will not be searched properly and can even cause the search software to return an error. A general way around this problem is to use the wildcards. For example, enter the author as o%sullivan or o__sullivan. (Remember the underscore matches a single character, but it just happens that the internal storage of this name is as o''sullivan so a double underscore is required to match.) The use of the % will sometimes cause some false matches but this is not too common.

Names with accents sometimes can be searched by entering the name with all the accents stripped off (e.g. Csorgo instead of Csörgö), but in the present version of the database this is not too reliable. The "old-style" interface at http://query.statindex.org/CIS/query sometimes does better at these searches (again, entering the name with accents stripped off).

This Web page last updated: 08/25/2004    [Send a question or comment]