Using Command Search in IEEE Xplore
To compose free-form, complex search queries,
use Command Search.
Find the Command Search page by clicking on Advanced Search just below the Global Search box
and selecting the second tab.
The Command Search page allows you to combine keywords using Boolean expressions
and proximity operators, as well as search within a variety of fields.
If you are using operators, you can enter up to 20 words in each search clause. Although parentheses are not required, they can
be helpful by allowing you to group together and prioritize parts of the query.
Let's do a search.
You can use the drop-down menus to choose Data Fields. If you select to search within
a data field, you must enter the data field before each keyword.
If you do not select a data field, your keywords will be searched in All Metadata. Metadata
includes article title, author names, publication title, index terms,
abstract, and other data fields.
You can use the drop-down menus to help enter operators into the text box or you can
type them directly into the box. Remember, operators need to be in all capital letters.
As with other search boxes in IEEE Xplore, if you don't enter an operator, the search engine will AND together your concepts.
Now, let's talk about the proximity operators. The NEAR operator keeps words close together while
the ONEAR operator keeps words close together and in the same order.
Suppose I'm looking for papers written about the haptic communication of touchscreens.
I know that touchscreen is sometimes one word and sometimes two words and haptic is sometimes called kinesthetic.
So let me structure my search to capture all these terms. I also need to keep the terms close together so I'll use the proximity operator
NEAR. The one-word touchscreen, haptic and kinesthetic will all be automatically stemmed, which is
the default in IEEE Xplore, so I don't have to worry about plurals.
Since I'm using exact phrase quotation marks around the two word "touch screen," auto-stemming will be turned off.
The words within quotation marks have to be an exact match. To allow the search engine to find "touch screens" (plural),
I'll need to add a wildcard there.
IEEE Xplore supports 2 wildcards, the asterisk wildcard represents any or no characters and the question mark wildcard represents a single
character. Wildcards can be used with any word over 3 characters, except in the author name field where the minimum is 2 characters.
You can use up to 6 wildcards in your search string.
With any proximity operator, I need to enter a number telling the search engine how many words can be in between my 2 concepts.
I'll enter the number 5 after NEAR/ to keep my concepts within 5 words of one another.
I'm also using parentheses to keep my OR terms grouped together.
Click the blue Search button and you'll see the results have both 1 word and 2 word
variants of touchscreen and plurals are captured for both.
There are lots of other types of searches you can do on the Command Search page.
Click on Search Examples to the right of the search box to see some ideas
or click on the other links to learn more about data fields
and search operators. This has been Command Search on IEEE Xplore. Thank you for watching.