If you need any further assistance with the RPR. You can contact a member of our friendly staff via phone or email if you need assistance.
Ask a Librarian is staffed from 9am to 5pm AEST/AEDT Monday - Friday.
Email: askalibrarian@csiro.au
Phone: 08 8303 8555
Boolean operators (OR, AND, and NOT), allow you to combine search terms or phrases. To use these operators in a search box, you must type them in capital letters. Other than Boolean operators, searches are not case-sensitive.
In the Search by keyword or the Advanced Search, you can enter a single word or several words connected by the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, to refine your search.
| Search operator | Example | Explained |
|---|---|---|
| Boolean operators |
Combine your search terms with boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT to either narrow or broaden your results list. They must be written in UPPER CASE, so they are not treated as keywords. |
|
| AND | sustainable AND revegetation |
Will search for items with both words, sustainable and revegetation, in any order.
|
| OR | cardiac OR heart |
Will search for items with the words cardiac or heart.
|
| NOT | biosecurity NOT covid |
Will search for items with the first word but not the second.
|
| Quotation marks “…” | "renewable energy" |
If you are searching for a concept with two or more words i.e. renewable energy, you should use double quotations “…” to keep those words together as a phrase. |
| Parentheses | (heart OR lung) AND bypass (Facebook NOT Twitter) AND social media |
Parentheses (or brackets) combine keywords, control the order of boolean operators, and create more focused search queries. |
|
Truncation * |
pollut* finds pollute, pollutes, pollutant, pollutants, polluting, pollution | Finds all variants of a word with multiple endings. Use the root word followed by a truncation symbol at the end. |
|
Wildcard ? |
organi?ation will find organisation or organization |
This symbol finds a single alternative or additional letter within a keyword. |
Keep in mind the following when creating search queries:
For example, the search birds OR mammals AND biodiversity will be interpreted as (mammals AND biodiversity) OR birds.
To prioritise specific search terms before combining them with other search terms, use parentheses. For example, If you are trying to find (birds OR mammals) AND biodiversity you can group the terms using parentheses.
You can use Boolean operators, phrase searching, wildcards and truncation in both the Keyword and Advanced Search interfaces.
Putting search terms within quotation marks e.g. "carbon capture" will give you the results with that exact phrase in the metadata. Thus a search for multiple terms (e.g. carbon capture) is likely to retrieve more results than a search for a phrase (i.e."carbon capture").
Examples of valid search combinations:
The question mark '?' can be used to replace a single character. This will be useful if you are looking for a name, or a word, with a spelling variation that involves only one change of letter. For example:
The asterisk '*' can be use to represent 0 or more characters.
For example:
Please note: wildcard characters (* and ?) cannot be used as the first character in a query.
Different browsers have different maximum query lengths. If you have an extremely long search query involving many criteria or a large block of text enclosed in quotation marks, you may reach the maximum query length for your browser. If this occurs you will get an error message. Try simplifying your search, searching on individual words or shorter phrases within the block of text.
Some publication dates have only been entered by year without any month information. If publications are made available by RPR in the first six months of the year, but no publication month is entered, they will be considered as having been published on 1 January. Similarly, publications made available by RPR in the last six months of the year will be considered as having been published on 1 July. To find specific publications in the results, you may need to enter broader date ranges.