Laboratory information |
Henri's pages
There are a couple of other things to watch: if you select Start Search
and nothing seems to happen, look carefully at the status messages produced
by your browser, and making sure the search has found something or failed before
starting another one. If you find too many references to display at once it will
let you search again to narrow the scope of what it has found; this search will
be within the list of references found by the first search, so this is
a very crude way to combine searches using different criteria.
If you retrieve too many references (e.g., by trying to find everything
written in French) it will simply display a rude message without keeping
any of the references themselves. It's always best to start with the search
that will yield the smallest number of references: for example if you're
interested in papers dealing with fire history written by a particular
author, search for the author name first, then narrow the search by looking
for fire in the keywords, rather than the other way round. The
searches are not case sensitive, so if you are not sure if a word has a
capital letter, just enter it all in lower case the word (e.g., enter
history to match History, history or
HISTORY). Searching for ranges of publication dates at the moment
is difficult, since it treats these as just another text item to search.
For the advanced users amongst you: yes, you can use grep-style
regular expressions.
You can modify the maximum length of the summary list it will return, but it's best to keep the limit small (the default is 32) until you have limited the search by all the words you require (e.g., if you're interested in all the publications by M.G.L. Baillie that mention volcanic eruptions, you would search for baillie as an author, not display the list of ca. 80 references immediately, but then narrow this using a search for volcan in the keywords field).
You can choose the details it will include in the summary by checking the boxes at the foot of the form. By default you will just see the titles, but you can also add the publication details to give a crude version of a reference list which can which can be pasted directly into your own word processor or bibliographic database. There is a link from each summary item to a complete version of the reference, including abstracts in some cases.
We would welcome reports of any problems you find, as well as suggestions for improvements.
Laboratory information |
Henri's pages