Searching SpringerMaterials

The SpringerMaterials search engine is based on a hybrid index for matching substrings like e.g. opti as well as multi-word terms like e.g. "optical Stark effect". It combines suggestions of terms to reduce typing effort for query formulation and employs ranking heuristics to sort the resulting documents by relevance.

In its basic form a simple query like crystal produces the same results as Crystal or CRYSTAL, i.e. the queries are always case-insensitive. Since the basic search mode is substring-matching, the input crystal will also return hits in crystals, crystalline, crystallographic, crystallography, nanocrystalline, etc.

Query Operators:

  • AND
    The AND operator is the default operator. If your query consists of a sequence of words separated by spaces, each space symbol is interpreted as an AND; e.g. optical stark effect is the same as optical AND stark AND effect This query will find all documents where all three words optical, stark, and effect appear somewhere as substrings in the text.
  • OR
    OR is often useful for combining closely related terms like synonyms in one query; e.g. methylurea OR 598-50-5 will find all documents which contain at least one of the two strings methylurea or its CAS-Registry-Number 598-50-5.
  • Double quotes for phrase search
    Double quotes around a sequence of words in a query only yields those documents containing the exact words in exactly this order; e.g. "optical stark effect" will produce only those documents containing exactly this phrase somewhere in the text.
  • ! for exact searches
    !crystal will find all documents with exact matches for the word crystal. Documents containing only substring-matches as in crystals, crystalline, crystallographic, crystallography, nanocrystalline, etc. are excluded.
  • BUT_NOT
    BUT_NOT is used to specify documents by some relevant keyword but excluding some known context from the result-set; e.g. !urea BUT_NOT optical selects documents that contain the exact match of urea but only if it does not also contain the substring optical.
  • { and } for nested queries
    { and } helps to handle several valid simple queries in one single and powerful nested query; e.g. {"Ruthenium" OR "7440-18-8"} AND "magnetic flux" combines the simple query "Ruthenium" or alternatively "7440-18-8" with the required phrase "magnetic flux".