Ethicsweb portal hosts two main search services:
- Ethicsweb search, which works on bibliographic data and other types of records in Ethicsweb databases, and
- Site search, which offers access to documents, which are part of the portal itself (notes in forums, documents describing other ethics-related services, legislation, etc).
Ethicsweb search
Logical (Boolean) operators
- Default operator is OR.
'law legislation'
brings same hits as 'law OR legislation'
- Precedence of operators: NOT > AND > OR.
- Precedence can be changed with parentheses. Operator inside the innermost parentheses is evaluated first.
'ethics AND law OR legislation'
- 'ethics AND law'
is evaluated first;
'ethics AND (law OR legislation)'
- 'law OR legislation'
is evaluated first.
- Operators must be in upper case.
'ethics AND law'
is not the same as 'ethics and law'
.
Wildcards
- Wildcard replaces a string of characters at the end of the word.
- Wildcard in Ethicsweb search is
'*'
. 'cell*'
stands for 'cell, cells, cellular'
, etc.
Phrases
- Phrases are sequences of words that must be present in search hits exactly in the same order.
- In Ethicsweb search phrases are denoted with double quotes, eg.
"sciences and humanities"
.
More details are available through links below.