SEARCH TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

SEARCH

Type search terms in the following searchable fields

Author: search any names of authors, editors, and committees/institutions/organizations

Title field: search any words in the titles and subtitles.

Subject heading field: search words in subject headings. The auto complete function will display all subject headings that contain your search words. Select and click the appropriate heading.

All Fields: search all above fields, plus the following fields:

DOIs
ISBNs
Abstract
Book series titles
Book table of content
Conference title, location and year
CEDB subject headings
Library of Congress subject headings
Author keywords
Author Bio

Publication Year field
: search the range of publication years, e.g. 2014 – 2015. Year range refers to publication year range, not copyright year or conference year.

Select serial titles: limit search to one or more journal/magazine titles

Search Exact Phrases. Use quotation marks to search an exact phrase, e.g. “Load and resistance factor design”. Otherwise, you will get search results that contain “load”, “resistance”, “factor”, and “Design” in different part of the metadata. Many of them may not contain the exact phrase “Load and resistance factor design”.

Auto Truncation: CEDB searches all variations of a term with the same root, e.g. if you type in transport, CEDB will search transported, transporting, transportation

Wildcards allow to search the root of a term that might have different endings, e.g. pipe* will also seearch pipelines. You can also use it to search an author's name when you aren't sure of the spelling.

AND operator: AND is the default search. For example, when you type in finite element method, CEDB searches finite AND element AND method.

OR operator: make sure to use uppercase OR for OR search, e.g. hurricanes OR typhoons

SEARCH RESULT FILTERS

Sort by: this function let you sort your search result either by Publication Year with the latest article first, or by Relevancy.

Filtered by: this function groups search results by document types, e.g. journal papers, books, and conference papers.

DISPLAY

Abstract Page Display: If a document is available in fulltext at ASCE Library, you will see ASCE Library abstract page. Otherwise, you will see CEDB abstract page.