Advanced Search in IEEE Xplore
To create complex, fielded searches or to search within the full text of all documents on IEEE Xplore,
use the Advanced Search page.
Click on Advanced Search just below the global search box.
There are 3 search boxes with drop-down menus to the right which show all the available search fields,
with the most popular options listed first.
You can change from "All Metadata" to "Full Text & Metadata" or "Full Text Only."
When you are searching for a concept which may not be captured in the paper's title,
abstract, or keywords, try searching Full Text.
Be aware, though, you are searching all words in over 5 million documents in IEEE Xplore
and, depending on your term, you may get too many results.
Most endusers find metadata searching to be the most precise search method. Metadata includes: Article Title, Author Names, Index
Terms, Publication Title, Abstracts, and other data fields.
You can search across all metadata fields or choose to limit your term to a specific field.
There are 3 operators between each search query on the left: AND, OR, or NOT.
You can add new lines and additional search boxes by clicking on the + sign at the right side of the 3rd search box.
Below the search boxes are parameters for refining your search by Publication Year, like documents added in the last one week,
or to a specific date range. Let's do a search.
I'm looking for researchers at UC Berkeley
working on autonomous traffic technology,
so let me start by identifying the university in Author Affiliation. I know that some authors use the full name of the university and some don't,
so I'll try both UC Berkeley and University of California Berkeley,
but I know there are variants so I will "OR" UC Berkeley
with Univ* Cal* Berkeley.
Search operators AND, OR, or NOT can be typed within the search boxes, but they must be in all CAPITAL letters.
I'm using the multi-character wildcard - asterisk (*) - to capture both abbreviations and full names.
IEEE Xplore supports 2 wildcards -- the asterisk (*) which can represent any or no characters,
and the question mark (?) which only represents a single character.
Wildcards can be used within any word of 3 or more characters.
This should widen my affiliation search to find all variants of the university's name.
Next, I'll add AND with the subject I'm looking for. To keep it broad at first, I'll search "road vehicles."
To force the search engine to find this as an exact phrase, I'm using quotation marks (" ").
I also want to just see papers after 2016, so I can use the date range slider, or just type in 2016 as my start year to search.
I'll click the blue search box and start looking through my results.
With over 100 results, this is a good first pass,
but I do want to narrow it down a bit, so I'll add one more term.
I'm interested in stability of systems. There's no need to go back to the Advanced Search, I can just use "Search within results" right here.
I type Stability, click search,
and now I have 14 very relevant results.
I can drill down into my result set and identify key papers or people. For instance, I'm interested in this paper,
"Stabilizing Traffic with Autonomous Vehicles."
It's exactly what I'm looking for and it's been cited 17 times.
Opening the HTML version of the paper, I can view the authors and their works separately, identifying top authors in my field and linking to
other papers that they have written. Searching Author Affiliations is just one example of how the
Advanced Search page can help you return more precise results.
Try searching the full-text or other fields to see how these field limitations affect your search.
You are now on your way to more targeted and relevant searching. This has been Advanced Search in IEEE Xplore. Thank you for watching!