How to search

Using keywords
Simply enter one or more keywords (words or phrases) that best describe what you are looking for. Separate each word with a blank space to make sure you find all documents with those words in them

The system is quite clever, so you won´t get a headache by having to worry about the following:
  • whether to use upper or lowercase (its not ´case sensitive´)
  • the gender of a word
  • punctuation for acronyms (UN will return the same documents as U.N.)
Search Suggestions
Once you have searched on your keywords, the results page will be shown. If you find that there are too many results, you can use the suggestions listed (in the « To refine your search » box) to narrow your search. Similarly if you find no results or too few results, you can use the suggestions to broaden your search.

Narrowing your query to a subsection of the site
If you want to find something within a particular section of the site, use the scroll down menu next to the search box, and make your selection from the choices available. By default the search will across « All the Site ».

Advanced searching
If you want to search more specifically, you might find the following ´operators´ useful.

AND:
To find documents containing all of your keywords, you can do one or a combination of the following three:
  1. Leave a space in between each keyword
  2. Use the "+" sign straight after each keyword (without using spaces)
  3. Type "AND" (with spaces and in capital letters) between each keyword
e.g.: A search using Blood donation will find documents containing both Blood AND donation.

OR:
Using OR will let you search for all documents containing at least one of your keywords. To do this, enter several words separated by OR (in uppercase letters and with a space between the operator and the words).
e.g.: A search using component OR apheresis will find documents containing either component OR apheresis or both.

NOT:
Get fed up with the same irrelevant documents coming up when you are searching for something? You can tell the search to exclude documents you aren´t interested in by using the NOT operator with a word of phrase that you know these documents contain.

To do this put a "-" sign immediately in front of the word or phrase. You can also enter the operator NOT or AND NOT with a blank space in front of the word you want to leave out.

e.g.: You want to find all documents containing the word tissue but of these documents you want to EXCLUDE all those containing donation. Simply enter the following: tissue – donation.

Phrase Searching: quote marks ("_")..
To find documents containing a particular phrase or set of words in which they appear together and exactly in the order you typed them in, use quote marks ("_").
e.g.: The query "tissue donation" will only retrieve documents containing the exact expression "tissue donation" and not "tissue cell donation".

Viewing your results:
- To make life easier you can choose to view your results either by date order or by relevance to your keywords(simply click on the view preference).
- You can choose to view or to hide the extracts (click on the matching preference).

Refining your search:
Click a phrase to refine your search.
Click on '>>' to restart your search.


Close Window