Help

Tip: the Help pages are context-sensitive so that, for example, if you were looking at a book's table of contents page and clicked the Help button, you would have been taken straight to the Help section about full text content. You can of course go directly to another topic by using the Help menu in the left-hand navigation area.

 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Oxford Scholarship Online
 Downloadable PDF of the online Help text

There are two main kinds of search you can conduct in Oxford Scholarship Online, Quick Search (just type a word and go) or an Advanced Search, which gives you more options to construct complex queries, and ways to refine your search. See Search Term Rules for a summary table of rules for using either.

Some common rules apply to both kinds of search.

Free terms	The search will try to find exact matches for your search terms, but will also use a "stemming" algorithm to look for plurals and other forms: for example, world will find worlds, world-famous, world-soul while persecute will find persecuted, persecution, persecutions, …
Variant forms	If you want to find results for a search term which is sometimes one word, sometimes two, use this format: "web site" website . This will find occurrences of both forms of the word.
Phrases	You can search for an exact phrase by enclosing it in double quotes, e.g. "mutually assured destruction".
Case Sensitivity	Oxford Scholarship Online searches are not case-sensitive. A reference to Julia Kristeva, for instance, would be found whether you typed julia kristeva, JULIA KRISTEVA or even jULia kRIsteVa.
Wildcard	Use the wildcard symbol * to widen the scope of your search. This symbol stands for zero or more characters: for more detail on how to use it see Using wildcards in a Search.
Boolean Operators	AND, OR, NOT – see Boolean Search.
Stop Words	Common words ignored by the search engine – for more see Stop words.

The asterisk wildcard (*) is a catch-all character which stands for any other character or combination of characters. It also stands for nothing, i.e. there doesn't have to be anything in its place - ratio* will find ratio as well as rations, ratiocination, etc.
Using a wildcard * across all subjects in OSO, you may find that you get more results than you expected. For ways of dealing with this, see Large numbers of search results, Refining Results or Advanced Search.

On the Advanced Search pages, you can use a Boolean Search to be more specific about how the search engine should look for search words. Boolean Searches use the logical operators AND, NOT, and OR to determine how search terms are treated.
Placing AND between search terms means that both terms must appear somewhere in the entry text. Inserting NOT before a search term means that that term must not appear anywhere in the entry text. Using OR between search terms means that either or both of the terms can appear in the entry text. For instance, a Boolean Search for
    zen AND metaphysics
is a narrow search that will find entries containing both the words zen and metaphysics, thus avoiding material on Zen Buddhism unrelated to metaphysics, and material related to metaphysics which has nothing to do with Zen.
A Boolean Search for
    zen OR metaphysics
is a wide search that will find entries containing either or both search terms. Note that this is the default for all searches, Quick and Advanced, unless otherwise specified.
A Boolean Search for
    zen AND NOT metaphysics
is a narrow search that will find entries containing the word zen, but will exclude any entries which contain the word metaphysics, even if they do mention zen.
You can combine any number of search terms and Boolean operators to build very specific searches, for instance     zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology) AND NOT axiology
Notice the use of brackets ( ) to group search terms in this example. It is important to understand how brackets affect the way search terms are treated: they have the same effect as brackets in mathematical expressions. Consider the first part of the expression above:
    zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology)

This tells the search engine to find entries which:

• contain the words zen and metaphysics
• contain the word zen and epistemology

You therefore ensure that the entries returned are related to both zen and (metaphysics or epistemology).

If on the other hand you ran a Boolean Search for zen AND metaphysics OR epistemology - without brackets - your search would return entries which:

• contain the words zen and metaphysics
• contain the word epistemology

Missing out the brackets alters the nature of the search entirely, returning a long list of entries related to epistemology, many of which will have nothing to do with Zen at all.

Returning to the full example above:
zen AND (metaphysics OR epistemology) AND NOT axiology
 this search will find entries which:

• contain the words zen and metaphysics but not axiology
• contain the words zen and epistemology but not axiology

A very small number of words are not searched for by the Oxford Scholarship Online search engine because they are extremely common and would generate a huge number of results. These very common words are referred to as stop words; an example of such a stop word is the. If you are using double quotes to search for an exact phrase and one of these stop words is included in the phrase, then the word will be found because it is part of the phrase specified. However, if you searched for the string without the quotes, the stop words would not be found. Characters such as exclamation marks, commas and question marks are also ignored.

Stop word list

a	f	k	p	u	z
b	g	l	q	v
c	h	m	r	w
d	i	n	s	x
e	j	o	t	y
and	by	it	such	these	with
are	for	no	that	they
as	if	not	the	this
at	in	of	their	to
be	into	on	then	was
but	is	or	there	will

The Quick Search tool is the easiest option to use: type one or more words into the input box and click Go, or press Return on your keyboard. By default, the Quick Search searches all parts of the texts except the full text (i.e. it searches titles, authors, keywords and abstracts at both book and chapter levels). So a Quick Search will find your search terms in titles, book abstracts, chapter abstracts and keywords.

Notes

• Quick Search assumes your search terms are connected by an implicit AND operator, so if you use more than one word, results will include matches for all of the words. If you want to see matches to any one or more of your search terms, use the OR operator (see Boolean Search) in Advanced Search.
• Quick Search does search full text in one case, when you're looking at a single book. If you choose the optionbutton search this title only before running a Quick Search, you will search the full text of the book.

If no exact matches are found, the search will look for close matches to those terms (plurals or past tenses of a verb, for example). Thus a search for suffered, for instance, would find suffer. This ensures that you do not miss information because you chose a slightly different form of the word to that used in an entry.
If you enter a search string containing more than one keyword, the search engine automatically looks for entries containing all of those keywords (an AND Search), not just entries that contain one or more of the keywords. Thus searching for V I Lenin will find references only to V I Lenin, not Lenin or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. For this reason, when you are searching for references to a person, it is sometimes best to search only for their surname in order to pick up the various different citations of the person's name.
See Search Results for information on interpreting the results of your search.
Advanced Search supports more complex searches: for example you may search the full text for terms that must be found in the same text but in different fields.
Boolean Search permits more complex still search expressions, precisely tailored to your needs.

Use Advanced Search to refine your search when a Quick Search returns too many or too few results. To begin an Advanced Search, click on the Advanced Search link in the left navigation bar at any time.

Options include restricting your search to titles under one or more subjects, or to certain parts of books only, such as the abstracts. You can combine any number of the fields and constraints: for example you could specify an author's name, a range of publication dates and two or three words that must occur in the full text all in the same search. You can also construct more complex queries using the Boolean Search operators.
Note: in Advanced Search the engine assumes expressions to be matched in different fields are connected by an implicit AND. For example, if you enter
   Evans in the Author field
and
   inflation and stagflation in the Full text field
you will only get results from works or chapters by an author called Evans where also at least one of the other two terms appears in the full text (on the same page if both are matched). If you want the looser constraint of one or more matches, you'll need to specify the OR operator in your search expression - see Boolean Search.

Using the Advanced Search controls

Title Author Enter search expression to be matched in this field specifically Keywords Abstract Search Enter search expression to be matched in this field specifically. Note: Keywords covers both book and chapter keywords; Abstracts covers both book and chapter abstracts Full Text Search Enter search expression to be matched in the body text of the book's chapters. ISBN Enter a full (ten-character) ISBN directly into the ISBN box and click Search. Year of Publication To exclude books with publication dates outside a certain year or range of years, enter a start and finish year in the from and to boxes against Year(s) of Publication. Sort by Choose a setting from this pulldown to specify in advance the sort order of your results. The default is relevance ranking – see Understanding Search Results – but you could also choose to sort by title, author or publication date. Subject Choose the Search all Subjects optionbutton or Set one or more checkboxes to confine the search to some of the subject areas only.

The results of a search are tagged with a relevance ranking, weighted according to the number of matches for your search term in significant parts of the text. The default sort order of search results is based on this score. (Other sorts include those on title, author or publication date: see Sorting Results.)

In this example of a relevance sort of results, you can see a number of ways of linking to the books where hits have been found. Each row relates to a (print) page of the book where a hit has been found.

From right to left, the links are

• print page number: link into the full text
• parent chapter's title: link to chapter's home full-text page
• (unless the page is outside chapters, e.g. in the book's end-matter)
• book title as link book's home page

An alternative display is used for other sorts of the results, such as this example from a sort by title:

From the top down the links (underlined) and legends are:

• book's title: link to the book's main page
• book author's name
• subject name, publication date
• page numbers of search hits in non-chapter material
  (in this example to end matter)
• chapter title
• chapter author
• links to chapter full text or chapter abstract alone.
• page numbers of search hits in this chapter

Results Count

Immediately above the list of results you will find a note confirming the search terms and stating the total number of results found:

Below this, and also at the bottom of the page are links helping you to step through the pages of search results. The legend next to these tells you which page you're on at the moment.

Print Page vs. Screen Page in Results
For full text searching, the unit of text is the print page. For example if your full text search expression is
   kropotkin bookchin
you will only get results where both Kropotkin and Bookchin are found on the same print page. As more than one print page is often included in one on-screen page, there may be situations where both terms occur on the same screen page, but are not found by an expression such as this because they are not on the same print page.

Results can be sorted in a number of ways. The default is by relevance; select other options by clicking one of the optionbuttons at the top of the page of results:

The pages of results are resorted and refreshed - this may take a moment. See Understanding Search Results for an explanation of the different results layouts used, depending on sort.

When you carry out an Advanced Search, the Refine search controls appear in the left sidebar of the search results page.

Use the Refine search box to specify a second search to be carried out only within your current results set. This offers a quick way of shrinking your results set, without having to go back and alter the original search expression.

Where you have a large number of search results, only the first 500 hits (50 pages of results) found by the search engine will be shown, and some relevant results may be omitted from the search results. This may in some cases mean that no results are returned from a particular subject or book.
Where this happens, you are probably casting your net a little wide, and should consider

• restricting your search to particular subjects or books
• adding further keywords
• narrowing the focus of your search by using Advanced Search options.

It is unlikely that there will be more than 500 hits directly relevant to your query, and it is more efficient to refine your search and let the search engine take care of filtering out unwanted material.