Data-related Publications

Use these tips to make your searches in the ICPSR Bibliography more effective and relevant

• NEW FEATURE: ICPSR now offers a beta full-text search for data-related publications.

• The “Show query matches” link to the right of each citation opens to a pop-up snippet box that shows your query term(s) highlighted in yellow where it matched.

• If ICPSR does not have searchable access to the full text, your matches will appear in the snippet box, matching on the publication’s citation elements.

• Use quotation marks for phrase searches and the minus sign to exclude terms:

“drug abuse” -adolescent

• Multiple terms use a Boolean AND by default:

“CAT scan” cancer

• To override the default AND, use Boolean OR between terms:

“CAT scan” OR cancer

• Stemming is automatic; no need to use an asterisk (*).

• Each citation includes a drop-down list of the studies or series collections used in each publication.

• The “Find full text” drop-down menu gives you links out to the full text of a publication, when available.

• To refine your search results list, use sort and filter features on the results page.

Caveats

1. The full-text search feature in the Data-related Publications results tab is still in beta, so results can behave unexpectedly

2. Only the first 150,000 characters are checked for the “Show query matches” snippets. The full document is still searched and ranked, but if your term appears later, it may not show the match in the snippet even though the publication is relevant.

3. Results may rank high for reasons that do not reflect the publication’s main content, e.g., if your search term appears repeatedly as part of a journal title.

4. Sometimes your query term only matches in the references list of a journal article, which yields less informative matches