Search Function

Structured Search

Scilit advanced search supports Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in structured advanced searches, in addition to field tags. You can find the explanations of field tags in the table below:

Field Tags	Explanations	Examples
Common Fields [Title, Abstract, Keywords]	Search the title, abstract, and keywords.	MachineMachine learn*"Machine learning"
Title	Searches article titles. The title refers to the title of a journal article, conference paper, dataset, preprint, report, book, book chapter, and any other resource on the platform.	MachineMachine learn*"Machine learning"
Abstract	Searches the abstract field.	MachineMachine learn*"Machine learning"
Keyword	Searches the keyword field.	MachineMachine learn*"Machine learning"
Subject	Based on a trained machine-learning model, Scilit automatically classifies each publication into up to three distinct subjects. The subject classification model has been trained with English publications only and may result in weak predictions for publications in other languages (if a prediction can be made at all).	Organic Chemistry
DOI	Searches the DOI field for records that have them.	10.3390/ijerph17051729
DOI Prefix	Searches the prefix of the DOI field for records that have them.	10.3390
Author	Searches the author field.	Albert EinsteinAlbert E*"Albert Einstein"
Year Published	Searches the publication year field.	2022
Publisher	Searches the publisher name.	MDPI
Source Title	Searches for journal titles, book titles, proceedings titles, and so on.	Reactions WeeklyReactions We*"Reactions Weekly"

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"And" with "Or"

If different operators are used, the search is performed according to appearance.
For example, if you search “energy” AND “policy” OR “SDG”, you will get a record that contains both “energy” and “policy” or contain “SDG”.

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"Or" with "And"

If you search “energy” OR “policy” AND “SDG”, you will get a record containing “energy” or containing both “policy” and “SDG”.

Command Search

• The Scilit advanced search also supports command search in the common title, abstract, keyword, author, and source title fields;
• Boolean operators can be used in the command search;
• You can also use () to have precedence;
• If you use different operators in your search without (), the search is processed according to this order of precedence;
• Please note that if you use OR to connect phrases and single words, you must use () for all phrase;For example, the search “(energy OR policy) AND SDG” will return a record containing both “energy” and “SDG” or both “policy” and “SDG”. Searching “energy policy OR SDG” will yield the same result as searching “energy AND policy OR SDG”.

Entering search keywords

• Capitalization: capitalization will be ignored in the Scilit search. However, AND, OR, and NOT will be recognized as Boolean operators in the advanced search.
• Keyword phrases: the Scilit search does not support phrases. For example, a search for Energy Policy looks for the words energy and policy in and across fields.
• However, you could use quotation marks to do an exact search. For example, a search for "Energy Policy" will return all records that contain the phrase Energy Policy;
• You can use an exact search in the common title, abstract, keyword, author, publisher, and source title fields.
• Punctuation and Special characters: Scilit will ignore most punctuation and special characters such as !, @, #, %, &, (, ), +, and =. For example, if you search C# programming, Scilit will return search result with C and programming in and across fields, this also means you will get the same result by searching “C programming”, “C++ programming”, or “C# programming”.
• The asterisk (*) is treated as a wildcard and cannot be searched for as a character. See more detail below;
• The quotation mark (“) is used in an exact search. However, punctuation between quotation marks will still be ignored.

Wildcard Search

• You can use * in the common, title, abstract, keyword, author, publisher, and source title fields.
• The asterisk (*) wildcard represents zero, one, or multiple alphanumeric characters in its position.
• The * wildcard can appear at the end of a word to find words with different endings, at the beginning, or in the middle to find words containing a specified pattern of characters.
• There is no minimum character limit to use wildcards. Search * ONLY will return all records in Scilit.
• Wildcard matching must match all characters explicitly specified. If you enter the keyword face*, Scilit matches facet but not fact because there is no e to match.
• Scilit uses fuzzy search, and wildcards ONLY represent characters in the position. For example, searching keyword comp*s will fetch records containing compression and compression. A table with more examples can be found below.

Stop words

• Stop words are ignored in Scilit searches; they are typically words that are too general or occur too frequently in the database to be useful.
• If you want to use Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT, please capitalize all characters.
• You can find some stop words in Scilit in the table below.