Searching the Metcalf Literature Collection Database
Literature Search Help
User-specified search terms.
Search Terms
Search terms are not case sensitive and require no diacritic marks
(accents) for non-English languages. Spaces between search terms are treated as
if AND had been entered, e.g. cicada leafhopper means the
same as cicada AND leafhopper and will return citations with both
"cicada" and "leafhopper" appearing in them. Note that some terms may appear
both with and without hypens, so froghopper and
frog-hopper do not match the same citations.
Boolean operators
Users may select Boolean operators in the basic query via use of
AND and OR. NOT is supported but requires that
another term be searched for, e.g. costa NOT rica NOT lima will match
citations containing "costa", leaving out citations containing either "rica" or "lima". NOT rica will
result in an error. & (ampersand) is supported as a synonym of
AND and | (pipe) is supported as a synonym of
NOT. Parentheses can be used to group boolean expressions. Use of
OR is a good way to find terms that may sometimes appear with or
without hyphens, e.g. froghopper OR frog-hopper.
Wildcards
* (asterisk) is the wildcard character, e.g. gen* will match "gene", "genus", "genera", "general", etc. Because zero character matches count, it will also match "gen"; thus a good strategy to match singulars and plurals is to use the singular form with a * on the end -- this does not work within a term, e.g. frog*hopper amounts to frog* AND hopper)
Advanced Search Examples
To determine which papers might discuss the chromosomes of spittlebugs of
the family Cercopidae (also called froghoppers), search the following as
<keywords> cercopid [OR] spittlebug* [OR] froghopper [AND] chromosom*
To find publications on the threecornered alfalfa hopper (also known as the three-cornered alfalfa hopper,
Spissistilus festinus, or Stictocephala festina) by Floyd Smith,
search three-cornered [AND] hopper* [OR] festin* <all as keywords>
[AND] Smith <in author>.
To locate Carl Stål’s works with new species of
Auchenorrhyncha, search new species [OR] "n. sp*" [OR]
sp* nov* <all as keywords> [AND] Stal <in
author>. For Stål’s papers with new genera, search new
gen* OR n. gen* [OR] gen* nov*<all as
keywords> [AND] Stal <in author>.
Such searches may be further limited by specifying a time period: for
example, append [AND] with either a year 1869 or a 10-year period
186*) <in date>. These examples take into account that new
generic and specific names are often indicated in a variety of ways (new genus,
new genera, n. gen., genus novum, gen. nov.; new species, n. sp., n. spp., sp.
nov., spp. nov., species nova, nova species).
Basic search can also support much of what advanced search
supports, by use of parentheses and fields to search, where the field is
one of keywords, author, title,
callnum, or date. To specify a field to query in a basic
query, indicate the field followed by a colon, followed by the terms you want
to search for in that field. For example, author:stal AND (keywords:n.
sp. OR new OR "sp* nov*") entered in the basic query is equivalent to the
first advanced search
option above.
NEAR Searches
NEAR(phrase1 phrase2, distance) will look for occurances
of phrase1 within distance tokens of phrase2;
if distance and its preceding comma are omitted, the value defaults to 10.
This is advanced use, and counting tokens is difficult for the average user, but this
can be useful if a simple this AND that query is returning too many results, e.g.
NEAR(this that, 3)
