Search Tips

Quick Tips for Advanced Search

Choose a field to search from the picklist.
Enter search term(s).
Click the AND OR or NOT buttons to add terms to the search box.
Repeat steps as necessary.
Select journals and/or subject categories below, if desired.
Click Search to run your query, or click Preview to see the result count of your query in the Search History section.

General

Searches can be performed using the Simple Search field at the top of PLOS journal web-pages or using the Advanced Search form. Simple Search provides a quick mechanism for performing searches on author names, words in article titles and words in the article body. Advanced Search is useful for searching on multiple fields and filtering results by Journal, Subject Category and Article Type.

Searches can be performed on Single Terms and Phrases. A Single Term is a single word such as global or climate. A Phrase is a group of words such as global warming. Single Terms and Phrases can be entered in both the Simple Search field and Advanced Search form. In Simple Search a Phrase should be enclosed within quotation marks e.g. “global warming”. It is not necessary to use quotation marks in Advanced Search: the “Construct Your Search” interface formats the Phrase while building the query.

Searches are not case-sensitive. A search on GENOME and genome will return the same search results. The minimum word length is three (3) characters. Words shorter than three characters are ignored except in author name searches.

Simple Search

To perform a simple search, enter your search in the Simple Search field at the top of PLOS journal web-pages and click on Go. Your search results will appear with a text field at the top of the web-page with your existing search query. You can edit this to submit a new search. This text field submits a Simple Search, just like the Simple Search field at the top of PLOS journal web-pages. Note that stemming is used in Simple Search in lieu of wildcards. To search for a Phrase in Simple Search, use quotations marks to define the Phrase e.g. “global warming”.

Advanced Search

The only way to perform an Advanced Search is from the Advanced Search form. The Advanced Search form allows you to create specific search queries based on your criteria. Wildcards and Fuzzy Searches can be used in any field on the Advanced Search form. It is not necessary to use quotation marks when searching for a Phrase in Advanced Search: the “Construct Your Search” interface formats the Phrase while building the query.

To search for multiple authors, use the Drop down box and select Author then type the Author's name in the text box. Choose AND to add the author to your query. To remove an author field, click in the query box to edit your query. In advanced search you can build complex queries using a combination of fields in the drop down box and the boolean operators AND, OR, NOT

Searching by Author Name

To search for an author in Simple Search, enter the author's given name, surname, or exact name. For example, to search for documents with the author “Patrick O. Brown,” you can enter Patrick or Brown or Patrick Brown or Patrick O. Brown.

In Advanced Search, searching on the Author field will return exact results e.g. a search for Patrick Brown will only return Patrick Brown.

To search for an author name with an accented character, enter either the accented or non-accented version of the author name. For example, a search on Ralph Muller will return Ralph Muller, Ralph Müller and Ralph Múller.

All punctuation marks and character case in author name searches are ignored. A search on Patrizia d'Amelio will return Patrizia D Amelio, Patrizia D. Amelio, and Patrizia D'Amelio.

Stemming

For most English words, searches are performed on the stem of a search term. For example, a search on genome will also match genomes, genomic, and genomics. Stemming uses a standard dictionary which does not include many specialized terms found in our scientific content. Stemming is supported in both Simple & Advanced search.

Wildcards

The following characters have special meanings to the query engine

: ! & " ' ^ + - | ( ) [ ] { } \

Therefore, all of these characters will be “escaped” by preceding each one with a backslash character

The wildcard characters ? and * are not escaped

Advanced Search supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms.

The single character wildcard (?) search looks for terms that match that the search term with the single character replaced. For example:

te?t will return text, test, tent, etc.

Right truncation involves placing the wildcard on the right-hand-side of the search string. For example:

clea? will return clear, clean, cleat, etc.

This wildcard can be used multiple times within the same string:

ra?n? will return rains, rainy, etc.

The multiple character wildcard (*) search looks for 0 or more characters. Right truncation involves placing the wildcard on the right-hand-side of the search string. For example:

radio* will return radio, radiometer, radiometric, radiosonde, etc.

Left truncation involves placing the wildcard on the left-hand-side of the search string. For example:

*ryotic will return embryotic, eukaryotic, etc.

Fuzzy Searches

Advanced Search supports fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde symbol (“~”) at the end of a Single word Term. For example, to search for a term similar in spelling to roam use the fuzzy search:

roam~ will return terms like foam and roams.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT are part of the query builder in Advanced Search.