Search Tips

For All Queries

  • Stemming is automatic; no need to use an asterisk (*).
  • The search will automatically strip out common words (a, an, the, and, or, not), but if you include AND, OR, or NOT (in uppercase) they will be treated as Boolean operators.
  • Some characters traditionally have special meaning in search. Our search does not follow these conventions; rather, they’re treated like any other character.
    • ? *  \ ^ ! ; ~ [] + – {} 
  • The one exception is that quotation marks (“) are used for phrase searching. E.g., when you want those precise words in that precise order.

  • Search terms can be anywhere in the study: title, description, variables, etc.
  • Because our holdings are large, we recommend using at least two query terms:
    rural economy
    home ownership
    higher education
  • Keywords help delimit the breadth of results. Therefore, use as many as required to achieve your desired results:
    elementary education federal funding
  • Our search will find studies with derivative expressions of your query terms: A search for “nation” will find results containing “national”
  • Use quotes to search for an exact expression:
    "social mobility"
  • You can combine exact expressions with loose terms:
    "united states" inmates
  • On the results page, you will be able to sort and filter to further refine results.

  • Enter words or strings that are likely to appear in a variable name, label, question, and value labels:
    Presidential election will return variables dealing with all presidential elections
    Presidential election Obama will return only variables dealing with the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections
  • Use quotes to search for specific phrases:
    "life satisfaction" "minority rights" "community programs"
  • A Boolean “and” is implied in the search.
  • The search automatically does stemming (more info); there’s no need to type in an asterisk. It’s also case-insensitive.

  • Search terms can be anywhere in the collection: its title or description, or studies or variables found within the collection.
  • Because our holdings are large, we recommend using at least two query terms:
    rural economy
    home ownership
    higher education
  • Keywords help delimit the breadth of results. Therefore, use as many as required to achieve your desired results:
    elementary education federal funding
  • Our search will find studies with derivative expressions of your query terms: A search for “nation” will find results containing “national”
  • Use quotes to search for an exact expression:
    "social mobility"
  • You can combine exact expressions with loose terms:
    "united states" inmates
  • On the results page, you will be able to sort and filter to further refine results.

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.
  • 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
  • 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.
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