Help Central

Welcome to Help Central of the PUBDB.

Search Tips

This page presents you with useful tips and techniques in order to help you use the PUBDB site to the full.

Search Guide

Full guide on how to search PUBDB.

Finding in a nutshell

The most powerful and convenient way for searching in PUBDB, especially for more complex queries, uses PUBDB "query language". This language s actually quite simple, yet very powerful. The basic principle is to tell the system where (the field tag) it should find what (your criterion). E.g. to find all documents with `foo` in the title one would just use title:foo

This kind of searching becomes especially powerful in conjunction with the identifiers used throughout the system. E.g. to get all publications published in `Nature <London>`, which are usually quite cumbersome to fiddle out due to the title of the journal, one can easily employ it's journal id PERI:(DE-600)1413423-8 and use the src field tag as src:"PERI:(DE-600)1413423-8"

The required id can easily be retrieved form the Authorities. You may also want to use the search generator as an easy way to create the queries required to fill in your publications lists on the web.

The following field tags are available:

abstract:	abstract	affiliation:	affiliation	author:	author	authorcount:	author count
citedby:	cited by	coden:	coden	collaboration:	collaboration	collection:	collection
datemodified:	date modified	division:	division	exactauthor:	exact author	exactfirstauthor:	exact first author
firstauthor:	first author	fulltext:	fulltext	isbn:	isbn	issn:	issn
keyword:	keyword	recid:	record ID	reference:	reference	refersto:	refers to
subject:	subject	title:	title	year:	year	adr:	address
aid:	authors id	aut:	Authority titles	bc:	Item barcode	cid:	contributing institute ID
clf:	classification	con:	conference	ddc:	DDC	exe:	Holdings
id:	identifier	ins:	institute	iss:	issue	lcsh:	LCSH
pag:	pages	pat:	patent no	per:	people	pid:	program id
pof:	POF id	pon:	POF name	prg:	scientific program	pub:	publication year
sid:	statistics key	slw:	subject	src:	journal	stn:	key name

Note that not all records hold data for all field tags listed.

To answer complex questions you can build the necessary complex queries using

• boolean operators
  • AND (can also be written as +)
  • OR (also |)
  • NOT (also -)
• bracketing ()
• quotes:
  • ' ' for substrings
  • " " for exact strings
  • / / for regular expressions
• wildcard * for any characters
• field tags to restrict matches e.g. title, or person etc.