New CORDIS search interface, July 2003

CORDIS has developed a new search interface which can be tested at http://ica.cordis.lu/search. With more than 40,000 web pages, nine databases and a huge range of documents, there is a lot of content to search. The new search screen is simple but accommodates both basic and more complex searching, though there is no guidance at this point on how to construct searches. Users are referred instead to the Helpfile which provides detailed instructions. From a dropdown menu you can select which part of CORDIS you want to search - the whole content of the site or specific sections such as funding, contact, exploitable results or the web pages. In the search box you can enter one or more terms; use the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT; and search for phrases by putting the terms in double inverted commas. The use of wildcards, truncation and parenthesis is also supported. In fact you can use either *, $ or % to truncate words. There is also the option to use the new operator WITHIN to specify a particular field search. The Helpfile gives full details of which sources have this capability and what the appropriate field names are. Limited date searching is also possible but date ranges are not allowed. Nor does the greater than or less than strategy work. However truncation of the date format - normally 2003-07-25 - to, for example, 2003$ would retrieve all records for 2003.

Once the search terms are entered, simply click on search. You can choose to display between 10 -50 records per page in the standard or detailed format and the search terms are clearly highlighted. The results can be sorted by date or relevance. Relevance is based on the frequency of occurrence of the search terms and is the default setting. It is worth noting that there is a maximum limit of 200 results. Where a search returns more hits, only the first 200 will be displayed, based on the relevancy ranking. Users should also note that if searching in languages other than English, the database searches for exact character matches. So a search in French for a term with an accented character would not return a hit if the letter was entered without the accent.