Search Tips

• If you are looking for information about a person, enter the person’s name in the format “first name, surname” and use the phrase search (e.g. “albert einstein”).
• If, on the other hand, you wish to find all the works by a particular author, enter the author’s name in the format “surname, first name” (einstein, albert) and select the “Author” or “Person” search field.
• If you are looking for a specific work by an author, limit your search to the author’s surname and add words from the title, e.g. einstein theory relativity, and use the ‘All fields’ or ‘Free text’ search field.

• When searching for a title, enter 2–3 keywords. This is usually enough to narrow down the search results.
• The more words you enter, the fewer results you will get. However, this also means that you may not be able to find the title you are looking for quickly, perhaps because of a spelling difference or a typing error.
• Select the ‘Title’ search field to narrow down the results.
• Alternative: If necessary, add the author’s surname to reduce the number of results. In this case, search in the ‘All fields’ or ‘Free text’ search field.

• If you are not looking for a specific title but rather a topic, enter 2–3 keywords and use the ‘Simple Search’ or search fields such as ‘All fields’, ‘Free text’, ‘Topic’ or ‘Keyword’. Do not search directly in the ‘Title’ field.
• Use placeholders or the synonym search to find similar terms or different spellings.
• Some databases or library catalogues offer functions such as 'Browsing' or 'Classification'. Here, you can select a general topic and then click through to more specific ones. Advantages: You can find literature on a specific topic, regardless of the document's actual title, and in different languages where applicable.

• You do not need to take case into account when searching. All variations will always be found.
• For search terms containing special characters, such as the accent in ‘mathématique’ or the ‘Å’ in ‘Årsbok’, use the basic form of the letter (in the examples, ‘e’ or ‘a’).
• Umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and the ß are usually also found in their unaccented forms (ae, ue, oe, ss). A search for ‘Erlass’ will therefore also find ‘Erlaß’ with a ß.
• In some subject databases – particularly those from English-speaking countries – umlauts, for example in the title of an article, are not converted to their basic form but are replaced with the ‘appropriate’ letter without an umlaut (so ‘a’ instead of ‘ä’, and not ‘ae’). This must also be taken into account when conducting a search.

If you are unsure how to spell a word, if there are different spellings, or if you wish to find all terms containing a particular root word, use the question mark (?) or the asterisk (*) as a wildcard. The question mark replaces exactly one character, whilst the asterisk replaces any number of characters.

• You are searching for: educat*
  You will receive results containing words that begin with ‘educat’ (educate, education, educational, educating etc.)
• You are searching for: wom*n
  You will receive results containing the words ‘woman’ or ‘women’
• You are searchin for: cat?
  You will receive results containing the words ‘cat’ or ‘cats’, but not ‘catastrophy’ (as the ‘?’ replaces only one character)

Take care not to place the asterisk too close to the start or end of the word. If you place the asterisk too close to the start, you will also find irrelevant results. If you place the asterisk too close to the end, you will exclude terms that are relevant to you.

Example: You are searching for terms relating to ‘education’

• If, for example, you search for ‘educa*’, you will also find non-english words like ‘educación’.
• However, if you place the wildcard after the ‘i’ (educati*), you will miss titles that contain only the word ‘educate’
• In this case, the best position for the wildcard is ‘educat*’.

As a general rule, you often can place a wildcard only once within a word. A search such as ‘wom*n*’ to find the words ‘woman’, ‘women’, ‘women's’ etc. might not be possible. In some search engines, wildcards cannot be used at all, or can only be used at the end of a word; alternatively, only the asterisk may be used, not the question mark. As a general rule, you cannot use wildcards at the beginning of a word.

Some search engines automatically include other word forms or similar terms in their search results. For this to work, the word and all its other forms must be listed in a dictionary. This is often not the case for non-English terms. If you use a wildcard, the automatic search for other word forms or similar terms is disabled. You may therefore find fewer results when using a wildcard than when you do not use one.

Many search services – particularly search engines such as Google – use AI systems in their searches or carry out fuzzy searches.

This means that you can now simply ask questions on search engines such as Google (ranging from ‘How do I write a seminar paper?’ to ‘Where can I publish a journal article?’) and often receive a relevant answer straight away. Often, you no longer even need to click on a search result, as the AI provides the answer itself. Website operators have already noted that traffic to their own sites from Google’s search results has fallen significantly since Google began displaying answers directly with AI support following a search. For general guidance on conducting research with AI tools, please visit our webpage Searching for Literature with AI Tools. There you will also find training courses on the topic of ‘AI’.

With fuzzy search – by comparing results against dictionaries, other users’ search queries or using AI – ‘similar’ search terms are also found. Actual or presumed spelling mistakes are automatically corrected; placeholders are automatically added, or other word forms (plural, genitive, etc.) are searched for.

Depending on the search service, fuzzy search can be disabled in various ways: either by placing the word in quotation marks or by adding a ‘+’ before the word, or by selecting specific search fields or ticking a checkbox (‘exact search’). Search engines that use fuzzy search often do not allow the use of placeholders; alternatively, if you use an asterisk to disable the automatic search for word forms, you may end up with even fewer results than you would have had without placeholders.

In some search engines, you can explicitly indicate that you also wish to find similar search terms by entering a character after a word. For example, if you enter ‘haus~’ in our library catalogue (the character ‘~’ at the end is called a tilde), you will also find titles that – in addition to the word ‘Haus’ – contain, for example, the words ‘Hause’ or ‘Häuser’.

Use the word AND (in capital letters), the plus sign or simply a space to find results that contain all the search terms.

• medicine AND ai
• medicine +ai
• medicine ai

When using a space, the results are sometimes displayed first in order of those containing all the search terms, followed by those containing only some or just one of the search terms entered.

Use quotation marks to find results where the search terms appear consecutively. This is useful for fixed terms or names.

• "Star Trek"
• "James T. Kirk"

Please note that using phrase search can significantly narrow down your search results, and that you must enter all the words in a phrase when using phrase search. For example, if the title is "Works by Schiller and Goethe", you would not find it when searching for "works by schiller and goethe" if you use phrase search, as the word "by" appears between the word "and" and "Goethe".

To search for words with the same meaning, abbreviations and their full forms, or terms in different languages in one go, use 'OR' in capital letters or round brackets to obtain results containing either one or the other (or both) of the search terms. In some cases, you may need to use both OR and round brackets.

• ai OR "artificial intelligence"
• (ai "artificial intelligence")
• (ai OR "artificial intelligence")

As an OR operator significantly broadens the search scope, you will often find many results. It is therefore advisable to add another term to the search that must appear.

• medicine AND ai OR "artificial intelligence"
• medicine (ai "artificial intelligence")
• medicine (ai OR "artificial intelligence")

Bear in mind how a search engine combines the terms, as a search for ‘medicine AND ai OR "artificial intelligence"’ could be interpreted by a search engine as a search for the terms medcine and ai, or for phrase "artificial intelligence".

Use the word NOT (in capital letters) or the minus sign to find results that contain the first search term but not the second.

• ai NOT risks
• ai -risks

Please note that some search engines do not ‘recognise’ the word NOT as a search operator and instead search for the German word ‘Not’ (hardship, distress).

Please also bear in mind that using 'NOT' may exclude pages that match your search query, while including pages that you wish to exclude. For example, a page with the title 'This is about the opportunities of AI, not the risks' would not be found using the search term 'ai -risks', because the word 'risks' appears on the page. Conversely, you may find pages where the topic you wish to exclude appears in a different form, e.g. 'The danger of AI'.

As it is very difficult to exclude an entire subject area / topic because of these problems, it is often better to narrow down your search using AND or phrases rather than excluding terms. The exception are subject databases, where you can specifically exclude individual subject areas.