Home › Help topics

The Search help

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

  1. Default operator is OR. 'law legislation' brings same hits as 'law OR legislation'
  2. Precedence of operators: NOT > AND > OR.
  3. Precedence can be changed with parentheses. Operator inside the innermost parentheses is evaluated first.

    4.      'ethics AND law OR legislation' - 'ethics AND law' is evaluated first;
         'ethics AND (law OR legislation)' - 'law OR legislation' is evaluated first.

  4. Operators must be in upper case. 'ethics AND law' is not the same as 'ethics and law'.

Wildcards

  1. Wildcard replaces a string of characters at the end of the word.
  2. Wildcard in Ethicsweb search is '*'. 'cell*' stands for 'cell, cells, cellular', etc.

Phrases

  1. Phrases are sequences of words that must be present in search hits exactly in the same order.
  2. In Ethicsweb search phrases are denoted with double quotes, eg. "sciences and humanities".

More details are available through links below.