Help topic: Searching

There are three main ways to search the content of journals on Cambridge Journals Online: the Quick Search, the Cite Search and the Advanced Search.

The Quick Search box appears at the top right-hand side of every page throughout the site. Underneath it you will see links to Advanced Search and CrossRef Search and, beneath them, the Cite Search boxes.

Quick Search

To use the Quick Search facility, enter your search terms into the box and click 'Search'. This will run a search runs across the full text of all articles on the site and their associated metadata fields (title, author names, keywords, etc). If you want to search Cambridge Journals Online for something other than journals content, click the 'Search Other Content' radio button. This will search across all the information pages but will not search the journals themselves.

Cite Search

'Cite Search' provides you with a quick way of searching for content if you have an article citation to hand, or if you know some or all of the bibliographic details of the content you are looking for. In other words, it is a more precise search tool than 'Quick Search' because you can use more search criteria. At the same time, because you already know what you are looking for you don't need the powerful search capabilities provided by 'Advanced Search'.

To use 'Cite Search' start typing the name of the journal you are interested in into the first box. As you type a list of journals that match your criteria will appear from which you can make your selection. You can then use any or all of the other fields (Author, Year, Volume, Issue, Page) to narrow down your search further. Note, however, that you can use any of the fields on their own (once you have selected a journal) except for the 'Page' field. If you try to do this you will see an error message asking you to enter more data.

Advanced Search

If you wish to narrow your search further, use the Advanced Search tool. (See Help on Advanced Search for more information.)

CrossRef Search

CrossRef search allows you to search all participating publishers' content. For more information about CrossRef, visit the CrossRef website.

Ranking results

To find out how we rank your search results, see Help on Search Results.

Some basic search techniques

The best way to enter a key phrase is to put it in quotation marks (for example "genetic epidemiology"). This will search for the exact phrase.

You can also be precise about the combination of words you are searching for. Use a plus (+) before words you require, and a minus (-) before words you don't want to include. For example, +genetic +epidemiology -"epidemiology and infection" will find articles with genetic and epidemiology in them, but no articles containing the exact phrase 'epidemiology and infection'.

When you use lower-case key words, you will also get matches with capitalised words. Similarly, if you use capitalised words you will get matches with lower case words.

You can use an asterisk (*) as a wild card (for example, fish* will find matches for Fisher, Fisher's, fishes, fisher).