IEEE-OES Digital Archive

Searching the Content using the ASTAware Search Engine

When using the CD-ROM set while the ASTAware search engine is active, you can enter query words into the search box on the left-hand side, and click Search (note that simply hitting the Enter key will not give proper results). The search engine searches the full text of all the articles for the query words. After a brief wait, you will get a list of result articles that match your query words - it will show basic information for each article, and a "frequency" count of how many times your search query words appear in the article. Click on the result's title to go to the minipaper file for that article; from there you can go to the full DjVu file.

If you enter more than one query word, the search engine looks for articles that contain all the query words.

You can get more control over your search by clicking on Advanced Search. From there, you can enter separate query words for the title, author, abstract, and full text of the article. Results of this search must match all of the query words you enter (for example, if you enter a title word "capacitor" and an author "Smith", you will only get back articles that have the author "Smith" and also the title word "capacitor"). You can leave a field blank to match anything in that field.

You can use an "*" at the end of a query word to search multiple forms of that word. For example the query "packag*" would match "package", "packages", and "packaging".

You can separate multiple search terms by the Boolean operators "AND", "OR", or "NOT". For example, the query "capacitor AND resistor" would match documents containing both the word "capacitor" and the word "resistor". The query "capacitor OR resistor" would match documents containing "capacitor" or "resistor", but not necessarily both. The query "capacitor NOT resistor" would match documents containing "capacitor" but not containing the word "resistor". All of the operators can be combined with the use of an "*". When you are using multiple fields of the advanced search, you should only use the "AND" operator within each field (not ("OR" or "NOT")).

Multiple search words separated by blanks are treated as if they were separated by "AND".

After you go to the minipaper file for an article returned by the search engine, your query words will be highlighted in a different color (but, note that this does not happen for query words entered into advanced search fields other than the full-text field).

Hints for effective search:

• Uppercase/lowercase differences don't matter in the search engine; you can enter all your queries in lowercase.
• The search engine doesn't use umlauts, accents, etc. on characters. So to search for "Günther", you would just enter "gunther".
• If the singular and plural forms (or verb and noun forms, etc.) of a search word are both relevant, and are both likely to occur, then use an "*" to capture all forms with a single query.
• Think about alternative terminology for expressing your query - especially if you are searching for older material in the collection, from a time when terminology may have been different.
• For most of the articles, the DjVu files are scanned bitmap images. The full-text indexed by the search engine for these files is generated by optical character recognition (OCR), and therefore is not perfectly accurate. If your query word is used only once or twice in the full-text of a document, there is some chance that OCR mistakes will prevent the document from being returned for your query.
• If you get too many results from a query, try doing an "advanced search" of just the titles or just the abstracts to narrow down your search.
• You can also use "NOT" to remove irrelevant articles, but this generally doesn't work well with full-text search, since the lengthy text of the article may just happen to contain one occurrence of your "NOT" term.
• If you know enough about the articles you are looking for to find them with the transactions, subject, and author indexes, that may be more effective than trying to use the search engine.