All Entries in the Category "Searching the SciX"

Search Syntax

Search Basics

SciX’s one box search form supports both fielded and unfielded queries. Unfielded queries without search terms will search the metadata of the publications, including author, publication year, title, abstract, identifiers, and bibstem, which may not produce the expected results. For instance, if you are searching for papers by the author Marc Mars, you want to search for author:“Mars, Marc” instead of Marc Mars to make sure that you don’t return papers that simply have the words “Marc” and “Mars” somewhere in the article metadata.

Fielded Searches

Above the search box we supply shortcuts to frequently used search fields. Simply click on the field that you wish to search and enter your search term in the provided location (generally between the supplied quotation marks). Alternatively, if you start entering the name of a field an autocomplete feature will suggest a list of possible search fields. You may string several search terms or use the filters provided with your results to help narrow the search selection. For instance if you want to find articles published between 1980 and 1990 by John Huchra, you can use:

author:"Huchra, John" year:1980-1990

To get you started, here is a list of search examples for commonly used fields:

The rest of this page goes over the search syntax and fields indexed in our database.

Combining Search Terms to Make a Compound Query

You can string together any number of search terms to develop a query. By default search terms will be combined using AND as the default boolean operator, but this can be changed by explicitly specifying OR beween them. Similarly one can exclude a term by prepending a “-“ sign to it (or using the boolean “NOT”). Multiple search words or phrases may be grouped in a fielded query by enclosing them in parenthesis. Some examples:

Operator precedence in multi-part searches

Searches involving only two search terms, as shown above, are straightforward to parse. However, for searches with multiple search terms and multiple operators, understanding how operators take precendence over each other is important. For the most control, use parentheses around terms and operators that should be executed first. Otherwise, operators follow these general rules:

• AND, OR, and NOT are set operators, operating on the search terms on either side. AND takes the intersection of the result set of the two search terms, OR takes the union, and NOT takes the difference. NOT takes precendence over AND, which takes precendence over OR.
• The default AND (i.e., not typing out AND but using just a blank space between the two terms, as in the first example above) has lower precedence than any of the Boolean operators above.
• The negative sign (-) is read as “prohibit”; results containing this term are completely excluded. In multi-part queries, its behavior can differ from that of NOT, because of the precedence rules.

For a more heavy handed exploration of the search syntax, feel free to visit the search parser details page.

Wildcards, Proximity, and Regular expression search

Synonyms and Acronyms

By default most search terms in SciX are expanded by adding a list of words which are synonyms of the search term. So for example, a search of “star” in the title field will be expanded to include words such as “stars,” “stellar,” “starry,” “starlike,” and so on. (Notice that this often includes words in foreign languages such as “etoile,” “stern,” and “stella”). While this feature improves recall, it sometimes compromises the precision of the results. Our search engine allows one to turn off the synonym expansion feature by simply prepending an “=” sign in front of the search term.

Our search engine also identifies acronyms during indexing and searching (defined as words consisting entirely of uppercase characters). A search for an uppercase word will only match documents which contain that acronym, whereas a search for a lowercase word will match documents which contain any variation of the word, irregardless of its case. Acronyms can themselves have synonyms (for example “SciX” and “Astrophysics Data System” are synonyms), so one should be aware that there is an interaction between case-sensitiveness and synonym expansion. The examples below illustrate these effects:

Author Searches

Synoym expansion also applies to author names, which provide a way to account for changes in a person’s name and/or different spellings due to transliterations. In addition to this, the default author search in SciX is “greedy” in the sense that it will return all documents in which an author signature may match the input search string. This allows, for instance, to have an author search for “Huchra, John” to return papers where the author name appears as “Huchra, John” or “Huchra, J.” By prepending the “=” character to the author search one can disable this feature (as well as any additional synonym expansion) and require an exact match on the author name. Some examples:

As a general rule we recommend to use the full name of the person for author searches since as can be seen above the matching rules in SciX are designed to find the maximal set of records consistent with the author specification given by the user. Rather than disabling the name-variation algorithm described above, we recommend performing refinement of search results via the user interface filters for author names as described in the “Filter your search” section.

The logic behind the author search is rather complicated, if you would like to learn more, visit the advanced author search page.

Affiliation Searches

Affiliations in SciX have been indexed in several different search fields, with the intention of allowing multiple use cases. We have currently assigned affiliation identifiers allowing for parent/child relationships, such as an academic department within a university. Note that a child may have multiple parents, but we restrict a child from having children of its own. The list of recognized institutions is available from our Canonical Affiliation repository on Github.

For a breakdown to department level:

• Use the “Institutions” filter in the left panel of search results
• Use parent/child syntax as defined in our list of Canonical Affiliations linked above (e.g. inst:“UCLA/IGPP”)

Users are reminded that while affiliation information is largely complete for recent refereed literature, not all records contain an affiliation; therefore, searching by affiliation alone will inherently be incomplete. We strongly recommend combining affiliation searches with author searches for best results.

Astronomical Objects and Position Search

The query modifier object: in fielded searches allows users to search the literature for bibliographic records that have been tagged with astronomical objects by SIMBAD and NED, or for a specified position on the sky (“cone search”). The cone search also makes use of services offered by SIMBAD and NED.

Queries for astronomical objects via object: queries return publications that have been tagged with the canonical names for these objects. This tagging has been done by the SIMBAD and NED teams. Additionally, the object names (as specified in the query) are also used in a SciX query against abstracts, titles and keywords in the astronomy collection (with synonym replacement switched off). The result set is a combination of all these matches. Object queries that target just one service (e.g. SIMBAD) are not currently supported. The data facet can be used to filter the results set.

The syntax for cone searches is:

  object:"RA ±Dec:radius"

where RA and Dec are right ascention and declination J2000 positions, expressed in decimal degrees or in sexagesimal notation (hours minutes seconds and degrees arcmin and arcsec). The plus or minus sign before the declination is mandatory. The search radius may be given in arcmin, decimal or sexagesimal degrees (The default search radius is 2’, and the maximum is 60’). Examples:

• A 10’ radius may be written as 0.1667 or 0 10
• The following 3 notations are equivalent:
  1. 05h23m34.6s -69d45m22s
  2. 05 23 34.6 -69 45 22
  3. 80.894167 -69.756111

Searching for publications tagged with objects returned by the coordinates in the example above, with a search radius of 10’ is done as follows:

object:"05h23m34.6s -69d45m22s:0.1667"

The equivalent of (see 2007ASPC..382..495K)

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/abs_connect?data_type=VOTABLE&DEC=60&RA=16&SR=.1

is the search object:"16 +60:0.1", followed by exporting the results in the VOTable export format. Currently there is no equivalent of SciX Classic URL shown above.

Available Fields

This is a list of fields currently recognized by SciX search engine and the preferred search format - go to comprehensive list of fields if not saturated yet:

(*) See below for details on these filters. In most cases, filtering of results based on these fields is available in the user interface.

Properties

The “properties” search field allows one to restrict the search results to papers which belong to a particular class. The allowed properties currently include:

Bibliographic Groups

The “bibgroup” search field allows restriction of the search results to one of the SciX bibliographic groups. These groups are curated by a number of librarians and archivists who maintain either institutional or “telescope” bibliographies on behalf of their projects. Here is a partial list. For more information on the criteria behind the curation of these groups, please see the link above.

The list of current Institutional bibgroups is: ARI, CfA, CFHT, Leiden, USNO

The list of current Telescope bibgroups is: ALMA, CXC, ESO, Gemini, Herschel, HST, ISO, IUE, JCMT, Keck, Magellan, NOIRLab, NRAO, ROSAT, SDO, SMA, Spitzer, Subaru, Swift, UKIRT, XMM

Data Links

The “property:data” search field can be used to select papers which have data links associated to them. The list of archives which SciX links to can be seen under the “Data” filter selection. To generate a list of all records which have data links one can issue a simple query: property:data. Using the property:data search field allows one to focus on data-rich papers, for example:

property:data AND (CXO OR XMM) AND HST

Finds multi-wavelength papers which have observations both in the X-ray spectrum (from Chandra or XMM) and in the optical (HST). Of course additional search terms can be used to further refine the selection criteria.

Document Type

Records in SciX are assigned a document type which is indexed in the “doctype” search field, the contents of which are an extension of the BibTeX entry types. Currently these are the document types indexed by SciX:

Citation and Reference Operators

When you submit a query, SciX returns a list of search results. Should you want a list of all the articles which cite those search results , or all the articles which are referenced by those search results, you can use the citation or reference operators.

The syntax for these operators are references(query) and citations(query).

Examples:

citations(author:"huchra, john")           # returns the list of papers citing John Huchra's papers
references(bibcode:2003AJ....125..525J)    # returns papers cited by the paper 2003AJ....125..525J
citations(abstract:HST)                    # returns papers citing papers which have "HST" in their abstract

One powerful aspect of having these operators at our disposal when creating a query is that we can combine them with additional search terms to expand or narrow your query. For example, the following query finds all papers which cite the original JWST paper as well as papers which contain the terms “Webb” or “JWST” in their abstract:

citations(bibcode:2006SSRv..123..485G) OR abstract:(Webb OR JWST)

Second-Order Queries

We provide five second-order operators which modify the query results by performing second-order operations on the original query. To invoke the operators, enter the corresponding operator before your search terms (enclosing your search terms in parentheses) in the search box. The search terms enclosed by parentheses are considered the first-order query.

Similar - The similar operator takes the text of the abstracts of the papers in the first-order query, combines them into a single “document,” then ranks all the abstracts in SciX by their text-based similarity to this combined document, and returns the ranked list. The returned results exclude the articles returned by the first-order query. The documents returned are the most similar, as determined via text analysis, to the topic being researched, while excluding the original documents. For example:

similar(bibcode:2000A&AS..143...41K)

will return a ranked list of papers that are textually similar to the given paper, while excluding the given paper from the results.

The next example:

similar("weak lensing" -entdate:[NOW-7DAYS TO *]) entdate:[NOW-7DAYS TO *] bibstem:"arXiv"

will return a ranked list of recent arXiv papers that are textually similar to older papers about weak lensing. Note that since the similar operator excludes results returned by the first-order query, we here use separate date ranges in the first-order query and the outer query in order to force the queries to be disjoint.

Trending – The trending operator takes the lists of readers who read the papers in the first-order query, finds the lists of papers which each of them read, combines these lists, and returns the combined list, sorted by frequency of appearance. The documents returned are most read by users who read recent papers on the topic being researched; these are papers currently being read by people interested in this field. For example:

trending(exoplanets)

will return a ranked list of papers which are currently popular among the readers interested in exoplanets.

Useful – The useful operator takes the reference lists from the papers in the first-order query, combines them and returns this list, sorted by how frequently a referenced paper appears in the combined list. The documents returned are frequently cited by the most relevant papers on the topic being researched; these are studies which discuss methods and techniques useful to conduct research in this field. For example:

useful("galaxy surveys")

will return a ranked list of papers spanning a variety of topics useful to researchers interested in analyzing surveys of galaxies.

Reviews – The reviews operator takes the lists of articles which cited the papers in the first-order query, combines them, and returns this list sorted by how frequently a citing paper appears in the combined list. The documents returned cite the most relevant papers on the topic being researched; these are papers containing the most extensive reviews of the field. For example:

reviews("weak lensing")

will return a ranked list of papers featuring reviews of weak gravitational lensing and its cosmological implications.

TopN – returns the list of top N documents for a user defined query, where they are ordered by their default sort order or a user specified sort order. For example:

topn(100, database:astronomy, citation_count desc)

will return the top 100 most cited astronomy papers.

This next example uses the default sort order for the interior query, so no sort order needs to be specified:

trending(topn(10, reviews("weak lensing")))

This query returns papers currently being read by users who are interested in the field of weak lensing.

Filter Your Search

Once you have a results list from an initial query you can use our filters to further refine your search. Your results list will change each time you apply a limit.

Clicking on any of the listed terms within a filter will automatically apply that term as a filter. If you choose a single term from a given filter, you will be prompted to limit to or exclude the search term from the list of results; if you choose more than one term from within a single filter, you will be prompted to select and (results must contain all of the selected terms), or (results must contain at least one of the selected terms), or exclude (results must not contain the selected terms).

Available filters

• Authors: filter individual authors in the results list
• Collections: include or exclude results from the astronomy, physics, earth science, and general collections
• Refereed status: include or exclude refereed or non-refereed publications
• Institutions: include or exclude results from the curated canonical affiliations that were found in the results of your original query
• Keywords: include or exclude keywords that were found in the results of your original query
• Publications: include or exclude journals that were found in the results of your original query
• Bib Groups: include or exclude results from curated bibliographic groups
• SIMBAD Objects: include or exclude results that contain SIMBAD object types or individual objects
• NED Objects: include or exclude results that contain NED object types or individual objects
• Data: include or exclude results that contain data in various archives (e.g. CDS, HEASARC, CXO, NED)
• Vizier Tables: include or exclude results that have Vizier tables or catalogs
• Publication Type: include or exclude records based on the document type

Example

1. Search for author:“Huchra, John”.
2. Open the author filter; you will get a list that includes “Geller, M” and “Illingworth, G.” If you want the articles in which “Geller, M.” is a coauthor with “Huchra, John” you would click on the name “Geller, M.” in the list.
3. If you want the articles in which either “Geller, M.” or “Illingworth, G” were coauthors you would click the boxes next to both of their names and choose “or” from the selection box. If you want the articles in which both “Geller, M.” and “Illingworth, G” were coauthors you would click the boxes next to both of their names and choose “and” from the selection box. (There should be zero results for this query!)

Positional Field Searches

The pos() operator allows you to search for an item within a field by specifying the position in the field. The syntax for this operator is pos(fieldedquery,position,[endposition]). If no endposition is given, then it is assumed to be endposition = position, otherwise this performs a query within the range [position, endposition] where position is the leftmost position considered and endposition is the rightmost. For example:

Currently the pos() operator works on these fields: author, aff, title.

Comprehensive List of Solr Fields & Operators

This is an extensive list of methods of querying the SciX system. It is a technical document and you probably don’t need to read it unless you are interested in performing advanced searches.

Solr (Virtual) Fields, Operators, and Other Stuff

An aggregated list of the fields, operators, and other parameters that are accessible from Solr. Descriptions of what they are used for, and why or where they should or should not be shown to users.