index

Searching the Topic Field

Enter Topic terms to search the following fields within a record.

• Title
• Abstract
• Author Keywords

index

Topic Terms in Cyrillic

The search электрофореза finds records that contain the word электрофореза.

Enter multiple words with or without the AND operator. The following searches are equivalent:

• ядерные отходы
• отходы ядерные

Use search operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, SAME) to prescribe a relationship between terms such as equivalence, exclusion or proximity.

Topic Terms in English

The search electrophoresis finds records that contain the word electrophoresis.

Enter multiple words with or without the AND operator. The following searches are equivalent:

• heavy water
• water heavy

To search for an exact phrase in English, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. Example: "heavy water"

Use wildcards (* $ ?) to find plural and inflected forms of words.

Use search operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, SAME) to prescribe a relationship between terms such as equivalence, exclusion or proximity.

index

Right- and Left-hand Truncation

Both right- and left-hand truncation are allowed when using wildcards (* $ ?) in Topic and Title searches.

You must enter at least three characters after a wildcard when using left-hand truncation and three characters before a wildcard when using right-hand truncation. For example:

• The query *oxide matches terms such as peroxide, sulfoxide, nitric oxide, and zinc oxide.

• The query oxid* matches terms such as oxidation, oxidative, and oxidizing.

• The query *oxid* matches terms such as antioxidant, dioxide, oxidative, and polyphenoloxidase.

index

Lemmatization

Web of Science automatically applies lemmatization rules to Topic and Title search queries. Lemmatization reduces inflected forms of a word to their lexical root. With lemmatization turned on, a search term is reduced to its "lemma" and inflected forms of the word are retrieved. As a result, lemmatization can reduce or eliminate the need to use wildcards to retrieve plurals and variant spellings of a word.

For example:

• cite finds inflected forms of the word cite, such as citing, cites, cited and citation.
• defense finds spelling variants such as defense and defence

Lemmatization applies only to English-language search terms.

Stemming

Web of Science also applies stemming rules to Topic and Title search queries. Stemming removes suffixes such as -ing and -es from words in a search query in order to expand the search and to retrieve additional, relevant records. For example, a Title search for vinyl recording will find articles with the term vinyl record.

Stemming and lemmatization are closely related. The difference is that stemming merely drops suffixes such as -ing and -es, while lemmatization makes use of dictionaries that define pairs and clusters (e.g., defense, defence) of words with the same meaning or with a shared morphological structure.

Both lemmatization and stemming applie only to English-language search terms.

index

Information About ...

• Author Searches
• Cited Reference Searches
• Advanced Searches