Explore: Finding books, journals and more

Once you are familiar with Explore basic search, if you want to create more complex searches it is easier to use the Advanced search option. Advanced search offers numerous features for making your searches more precise and enable you to get results that are more useful.

On this page you will find:

• Advanced search
• Advanced search filters

We recommend you sign in to Explore before you start your search.

• Why should I sign into Explore?

To begin an advanced search, click the 'Advanced Search' link to the right of the magnifying glass to open the 'Advanced search' box.

Like in the Basic search mode, you can start with selecting the type of resource you want to search, to define the scope of your search.

Use search filters to start building your search. From the drop-down menu select the field you want to search:

• Any field.
• Title.
• Author/creator.
• Subject.
• Shelfmark.  
• Former Shelfmark.  
• Creation date.

Once you have selected a field, you can select where you want your keywords to appear in the materials you want to find. From the drop-down menu you can choose to use:

• Contains: results that contain all words you enter.
• Is (exact): results that contain phrases that exactly match the order of your keywords.
• Starts with: results that contain words that start with those you enter.

Use Boolean operators from the drop-down menu to combine search lines:

• AND: to find items that contain all the words.
• OR: to search for items that contain at least one of the words.
• NOT: to exclude from your search items that contain specific words

By default Explore will show two search lines, to add more click on the + (plus) sign. You can have up to seven search lines.

In the 'Advanced search' mode, before you run your search, you can select:

• Material type.
• Language.
• Start and End date (date range).

E.g. If you want to find which video adaptations of Jane Austen's novels are available in the library, select the Author/creator field, then in the 'search type' select 'is exact', then type Jane Austen. Under 'Material type' select 'Video', then click on the Search button.

In 'Advanced search' you can also perform searches that return all records for one or more selected pre-filters (such as Material Type and Language). To perform this type of search, enclose the asterisk (*) wildcard in double quotation marks (") and select at least one pre-filter. For example, if you want to find materials in Finnish:

• select the language from the drop-down menu and in the search box type "*"

Once you become more experienced at literature searching, or if you are carrying out a search for a systematic review, you might find some more advanced searching techniques are helpful.

The following pages provide information on

• adjacency or proximity operators,
• using wildcards,
• building a search by combining from the search history,
• translating your search to another database.

If you are carrying out a systematic review you might also like to consult our guide on searching for systematc reviews: