Advanced Search, Boolean Operators & search-result ordering

1) Currently there isn't any "Advanced Search" option to search by specific fields such as "Authors", "Year", "Journal" etc, much like in the Web of Science search. While it is possible to use field codes such as "Author:", etc, this would make searching a lot more user friendly

2) I would like to have the ability to use BOOLEAN operators for searches (like AND, OR).

3) Lastly, it would be nice to have more options with how searches are ordered. For example if I search "nanoscale", I get a list of all documents containing the word nanoscale. However this listing is haphazard. It would be nice if files having the search term in the title are given higher weighting, lumped together and show up at the top of the search ("A Mendeley PDF rank", much like Google's Page Rank =) ). If you eventually incorporate Abstract fields, then maybe give the next weighting to files with the word in the Abstract and subsequently list PDFs which contain the term in the body of the PDF text (maybe sorted in descending order of frequency of appearance of the search term).

I think these would make the Search functionality absolutely awesome! Thanks for all the hard work on this great app!

1,163 votes

Sudeep Mandal shared this idea · Mar 16, 2009 · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →

under review ·

AdminMendeley (Admin, Mendeley) responded · Oct 31, 2012

1) This is currently possible, although not very intuative: you can find more searching options here: http://www.mendeley.com/faq/#advanced-search However, we realise this is not very intuative and are looking to improve this in a future version.

2) The boolean operators such as AND/OR work as expected in Mendeley 1.6, although there are improvments in 1.7 (to be released later in 2012).

3) This has been logged with our Developement Team for a future version.

80 comments

Daniel Kachelriess commented · June 6, 2013 1:59 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

I especially agree with 1) of the original suggestion:

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1) Currently there isn't any "Advanced Search" option to search by specific fields such as "Authors", "Year", "Journal" etc, much like in the Web of Science search. While it is possible to use field codes such as "Author:", etc, this would make searching a lot more user friendly
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Search by/within "Year" or "Journal" would greatly improve the usefulness of Mendeley's crowd-sourced research catalog!
Evgeny Romanov commented · May 25, 2013 1:39 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Now I have version 1.8.4 and boolean search still not working as expected. NOT operator is not supported. Not sure for > and <. Furthermore non of search options are documented in Mendeley manual. Search on Mendeley website also does not provide complete reference what is supported and what is not. By the way link posted above by Mendeley admin http://www.mendeley.com/faq/#advanced-search also does not work as expected - it not linked with an article on advanced search. The most annoying that I cannot sort results of the search, what it highly important when you get a couple of hundreds responses. I would support previous comment concerning ProCite search functionality - I still use my old ProCite database when I fail to find reference in my Mendeley database - I go to ProCite. So Mendeley developers should learn how a perfect search engine of ProCite is working.
Stephanie Ritchie commented · April 23, 2013 9:20 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Please review the search functionality of ProCite (now owned by Thomson Reuters, but developed independently). As a librarian, I have used and helped others to use several bibliographic management software products and ProCite has the best internal search functionality of all. It allows the user to search any field (and some groups of fields (i.e. all author fields)), use an array of search operators (beyond Boolean), and search by terms from selected indexed fields (In ProCite these are Author, Journal, Title, Keywords, Workform (= Document Type in Mendeley), or Group).

I was never unable to find a document in a large database or develop a search I needed for a specific operation. I know that the structure of ProCite might be fairly different from Mendeley in terms of programming/etc., but I believe a similar functionality could be achieved.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
Christopher Pilson commented · April 20, 2013 1:11 p.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Sorry, Mendeley Admin, I must have missed something here.

How exactly might we order our search results?
Normen Müller commented · March 31, 2013 1:36 p.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Why can't one save a (advanced) query, like "<name> := tag: a tag:b tag:-c"?
Jake R. commented · November 11, 2012 2:11 p.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Actually, Boolean search does NOT work as expected in Mendeley 1.6 - searching for "author:Smith AND apples" returns results for "author:Smith OR apples". I have basically been unable to use my Mendeley library for the past 6 months since it has gotten large enough that I can no longer find articles when I need them. It's crazy to me that you guys are working on iOS apps when the desktop is missing something as basic as the ability to search for articles older than a certain date, or the ability to sort results by author or title. I see people saying the same thing in this comment thread going back to 2010. How is this not your number one development priority?
Roel De Coninck commented · October 10, 2012 4:53 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

I tried the preview of the Desktop 1.7, but it's not possible to sort the results of a search, eg by year. Please add this before relasing the 1.7 version.

Also, when searching with Year: it is not possible to search for eg. papers since 2007. I hoped a range would be possible, like Year:>2007 or Year:2007-2012.
Anonymous commented · October 10, 2012 1:10 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

The workaround for sorting after search (switch to table view) does not work (anymore?) in v1.7Dev1.
Clicking on the columns does _not_ rearrange the results.
AdminMendeley (Admin, Mendeley) commented · October 8, 2012 6:36 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.7 is available. This includes a number of improvements to search:

- Incremental search
- More consistent behavior between search in document metadata, full text and in the citation editor
- Performance improvements to full text search
- More consistent handling of boolean queries. Currently AND/OR and '-' (not) are supported. Nested boolean queries and parenthesies are not supported.
- Search in any metadata field (via "fieldname:<keyword>" queries)

You can download the preview release from http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/preview/
Robert Knight commented · August 29, 2012 2:54 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Hello. There will be some improvements to search in the next release. See my comments on http://blog.mendeley.com/tipstricks/how-to-series-how-to-search-your-notes-and-other-fields-part-10-of-12/#comments for details. The focus is mostly on consistency/performance/robustness rather than new features but there will be a number of tweaks and fixes that make search nicer to use.
Andy commented · June 15, 2012 10:36 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Some other ideas:

1. Allow searching of annotations (both notes and highlights)
2. Allow searching of the Notes tab/box for each document.
3. Allow searching by specific meta data fields (journal, tags, keywords, year, institute)

All this advanced search functionality should all be accessible via an advanced search dialog with the option for the search box to also accept advanced search operators, e.g. year:1999 journal:BMJ
Peter Newman commented · June 1, 2012 5:51 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Differentiating whole word and partial word searches would be great - I'm adding this comment after hitting exactly the same problem as Eli (commented · December 19, 2011 22:43), searching for the word "ratio" and hitting integRATIOn, opeRATIOn and many others.

Please!
Omar Mian commented · May 25, 2012 3:48 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

There has been no admin comment on this idea since March 2011.
Any chance of an update on progress?
Omar Mian commented · May 25, 2012 3:45 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

If I search author:alexander, I am almost always going to be interested in finding articles by authors with the surname "alexander". But the search currently also finds articles by authors with the first name "alexander".

There should be a search field to allow searching by author surname.
Anonymous commented · May 17, 2012 1:42 p.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

and "replace". Ideally it would be nice to have a global find and replace.
Jiguang Li commented · May 9, 2012 2:39 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

It would be fine to be able to search author name with special letter like {\"o} and so forth.
Benjamin Leblanc commented · March 19, 2012 3:56 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Searching within abstracts can be really helpful. Any chance we could have "Abstract" in the list of available search fields for search queries in Mendeley Desktop?
Anonymous commented · March 7, 2012 11:38 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Another vote for sorting results by "Mendeley readership", I'd say make this the default even without the other complicated stuff.
Ruggero Dondi commented · February 15, 2012 11:32 a.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Thanks for starting to address this suggestion. While you are at it, may I ask to have the ability to sort by clicking on the columns WHILE doing a search ? It's really frustrating to see the columns disappear while doing any search and reappear after deleting the search field!
isheivis commented · February 7, 2012 3:15 p.m. · Flag as inappropriate · Delete

Can you please make results sortable by Mendeley readership and also by publication date? please, please...