What is an advanced search, and how do I do one?
Advanced Search is similar to Simple Search, in that it's a way for you to search ANU Library's collections of journal articles, books, audiovisual material, newspapers and maps. However, unlike Simple Search, Advanced Search allows you to refine your search, use boolean operators, and add more keywords to your search than a Simple Search.
You'd use Advanced Search if you were looking for very particular materials, or want to conduct a narrow, targeted search to answer a focused research question.
When using Advanced Search, you can choose whether to search only a particular field, such as the title or abstract of an article, and to use Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or broaden your search.
You can also select a date range before you search, or add filters such as location or language before you begin searching.
You can construct a more complicated search in Advanced Search, by adding more lines to your search. This will help you to create a search string that will return a very narrow, targeted set of results. See below for an example of a search string in Advanced Search.
What are title and author searches, and how do I do them?
To perform these searches, click on Advanced Search, and from the dropdown that says "Any Field", select either title, or author.
If you select a title search, you can either search for an exact title, or you can search for your keywords in the title only. This will return a shorter list of results, because it will not return any articles where your search terms are in the body of the text or the abstract - they will only be shown if they are in the title of the source.
If you select author search, you can type the name of the author in that field. Do not put keywords in this field as it will not return any results.
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