Getting the Most Out of SciFinder

SciFinder-n enables both natural language searches and boolean operation searches as part of its search engine.

For information on the general rules of text searching in SciFinder-n, please see this page.

• Suppose you are looking for references on sore throats and antibiotics. In this case, you can formulate a query like "antibiotics OR medicine AND pharyngitis."
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• The sources returned might not be exactly what you are looking for with the first search. You can start to narrow your results down by finding words you don't want returned. For example, this search returns a reference that extensively discusses streptococcus, which might not be of interest to you.
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• You could adjust your search to "antibiotics OR medicine AND pharyngitis NOT streptococcus" to remove those results.
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• Adding Fielded Search options can assist you in finding the precise needs of your research question, especially if a general search proved to be too broad.

• Creating Fielded Search fields allows for your queries on certain information to be solely focused on that field.

  • eg. the Publication Year set to 2000, with no upper bound, will only search the publication dates for information, and won't pick up on text in the title or abstract.

  • Similarly, the author field will only search the listed authors of the reference, but will not search the sourced references inside of the article.

• Note: boolean operators do not work in fielded searches, so you may not use AND, OR, or NOT. Use another box for this.
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• Using Fielded Searches in this manner can greatly reduce the amount of references you sift through. This search results in a total of 17 references.
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• The CAS Lexicon can be used to search within CAS's predetermined concepts. It can be accessed below the initial search engine in SciFinder-n.
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• Searching a string will prompt SciFinder-n to provide you with related concepts to what you typed. You can select any of these to add them to your query.
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• Once you select one of the terms in SciFinder-n's lexicon to use, it will sometimes prompt you words its algorithm thinks are similar and offers you the addition to add those to the query. You can add any of these or none of them.
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• After the first query has been added, you will need to use the Boolean functions at the bottom to determine the relationship of the next query.
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• You can view the Citation Map for any reference by selecting the aptly named button.
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• This button will bring you to a new window, where you can see what references the item in question cites (on the left) and what references cite the item in question (on the right).
  • This can help to easily visualize where the information is coming from.
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