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!
Sudeep Mandal
shared this idea
66 comments
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Anonymous
commented
and "replace". Ideally it would be nice to have a global find and replace.
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Jiguang Li
commented
It would be fine to be able to search author name with special letter like {\"o} and so forth.
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Benjamin Leblanc
commented
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?
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Anonymous
commented
Another vote for sorting results by "Mendeley readership", I'd say make this the default even without the other complicated stuff.
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Ruggero Dondi
commented
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!
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isheivis
commented
Can you please make results sortable by Mendeley readership and also by publication date? please, please...
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Anonymous
commented
Frankly, it is rediculous boolean search operators are not available yet. It's 2012. This was raised 3 years ago. The Mendely development team are too slow and have probably lost the plot. Alongside the silly auto-filling in of database fields with totally wrong Journal papers without verficiation with the user is beginning to make this package unusable.
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Alexander Vozny
commented
Searching "author:authorname keyword" still performs as "author:authorname OR keyword" instead of "author:authorname AND keyword"
It's been probably 2 years as it was pointed out and still not fixed.
Please, do something! -
Eli
commented
An important part of this feature would be the ability to do 'whole-word only' searches. If I'm searching through a paper for the term 'ratio', I get way too many hits because it includes everyone that contains ratio, such as configuration, acceleration, consideration - you get the idea.
Thanks! -
radiomeat
commented
This idea was first posted in 2009... What's the plan, Medeley? Thanks.
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Daniel Hickstein
commented
The search function when I insert a citation into MS Word works great. I type "Johnson 2001" and the 2001 paper by Johnson pops up as the first hit. Why does the search within Mendeley work differently and less effectively?
Thanks!
Dan -
Alexandre Rodrigues commented
Very often the search by title does not find all the papers with that word in the title. I find this anoying
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Rhuska
commented
Great idea! It would definitely be swell to have the search ranking, where you search for a word and articles are given scores depending on where the word appears (title, abstract) and number of occurrences in the text. I suppose the most efficient way to do this is to index all the text in the pdf files for rapid results, or use the index from the OS itself (I know at least windows and os x (spotlight) has this indexing).
Thanks for a great app!
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Ashley
commented
i don't mind the current search. For example I can search for an author using "author:lee". However, I would like to also be able to search by journal, for example, "journal:science"
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Mark Dean
commented
The search ordering needs to be much more intelligent than it is now. At the moment if I search for an author's surname, it often lists lots of articles that reference the author before it lists articles actually written by the author. I know I can filter by authors too, but that is rather laborious.
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tauceti
commented
I second/third the request for a search by "type"! It would be very handy to be able to search by all of the available fields that we've filled out, not just by author/tag/publication/etc.
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Alexander Bachmann commented
I think what would be really helpful, if we could order search results (and also lists of papers in a group) by the amount of readers the papers have. So, those papers, that have been read by other people most often, can be displayed on top.
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osm
commented
Is it currently possible to search a date range?
year:1993-1995 (for example) does not seem to work, but I wonder if the required syntax might be different. -
osm
commented
Also, please keep a search history so I can choose previously used search terms.
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osm
commented
The logical NOT operator in the following term is not working
author:doe -author:smithThe search result is the same as
author:doe author:smithAlso, please ignore accents and other diacritical marks in searches. In case its not on your radar - there is a specific request for this:
http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/926129-ignore-accents-during-search-either-by-default-orThe current inability to order the search results is a major annoyance.
Being able to save searches as folders would be very useful too:
http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/250337-smart-categories-
