Search Tips

Simple Search

Using the simple search is easy: just type in words or phrases into the search box, hit Enter or click on the Search button, and the database will retrieve records that are relevant to your query. The simple search searches across all of the database fields.

Some basic guidelines

• Generally, all the words you put in the query will be used, but common linking words called stop words are ignored. These are listed in the stop word list.
• Search is always case insensitive. Searching for mycotoxins is the same as searching for MYCOTOXINS.
• Mostly punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).

Phrase search (“”)

By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling the search engine to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. This can be useful to help refine your search and find the more relevant items on a topic with a large number of records.

However, the relevancy sort function takes into account the order of your terms and the fact that the words are together so it means that records which are matching are more likely to be at the top of the list. With this in mind quotes are often not necessary and it might be best to try the search initially without quotes. If you always use a phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for “sulphur dioxide” (with quotes) will miss the records that refer to S02 and sulphur. Phrase searching replaces some of the uses of “adj” function in the old database system.

Example: flavour stability = 1,284 records, “flavour stability” = 684 records.

Terms you want to exclude (-)

Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want records that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, “sulphur dioxide” –sulphite will return records that contain the phase sulphur dioxide but not records containing the world sulphite. This replaces the term NOT used in the old database system.

Fill in the blanks (*)

The, asterisk, *, or wildcard, is little-known but can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells the database to try to treat the asterisk as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example enzym* will return records that contain enzyme and enzymatic. Sometimes it is not necessary for example if you do a search on malt it will automatically find maltose, malting, malted. If you wish to only include the word malt you should search for “malt” . The asterisk replaces the $ symbol used in the old database system.

The OR operator

The default behaviour is to consider all the words in a search, equivalent to using AND. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator which can be typed in capital or lowercase. For example, “sulphur dioxide” OR “hydrogen sulphide” will give you results about either one of these chemicals, whereas “sulphur dioxide” “hydrogen sulphide” (without the OR) will automatically link the two phrases with “and” so the search will only return records that contain both phrases.

Advanced Search

If you wish to be more specific about which fields you search across you should use the advanced search.

You can add as many fields as you like to an advanced search by clicking on the Select Criteria Button

Most of the time this will discover exactly what you were looking for. However, you can refine your technique to make the most of your searches. You are welcome to contact membership@bri-advantage.com for assistance with searching, and to understand how you replicate searches which you used to do on the old database.

Sorting

For each database once a search has been performed records can be sorted by “Most relevant” which is the default, by “Latest First” to view the most recent records and also by “Oldest First”.

Document Ordering

A document ordering facility is available – please contact membership@bri-advantage.com if you would like to try this for you company. Items in the BRI Review database are available as PDF documents to download as full text.