Searching in Physical Review Letters online

The Search form lets you find Physical Review Letters online documents to use. To go to the Search form, click on the Tool bar's Search button when it is highlighted. Use the Search form to begin any of the following procedures:

Contents of this Help topic:

Related Topic: Advanced Searching Techniques: Includes information about using Boolean (AND, OR, NOT), proximity, and character masking operators; also includes additional information about indexes

Using the parts of the Search form

Tool bar: Click on any highlighted button to move to the screen or form that it represents. On the Search form, the Search button is not highlighted and not dim.

Name of the journal that you are using: Until you select another journal or log off, all your activities apply to this journal.

Start Search button: After you prepare your search using the Search For box, Search Type buttons, and Search Limits boxes, click on this button to begin the search.

Search For box: Click on this box to type your search word(s). Sample search words:
electromagnetic transparency
antiresonance
condensed matter

Search Type buttons: If Any is selected, EJO searches the text and other parts of each document that contain subject content. If Author is selected, EJO searches the author information in each document. If Title is selected, EJO searches the title of each document. If you select no button and type no index label in the Search For box, EJO searches as if you selected the Any button.

Document Type Search Limits box: When the box contains [No Type Limit], your searches find all types of Physical Review Letters online documents. Click on the arrow in the box to view a drop-down list of the document types. To limit search results to a particular type of document, select that type so that it displays in the box.

Subject Heading Search Limits box: When the box contains [No Sbj. Limit], your searches find Physical Review Letters online documents regardless of their subject headings. Click on the arrow in the box to view a drop-down list of the subject headings. To limit search results to a particular subject heading, select that heading so that it displays in the box.

Publication Dates Search Limits box: When this box is blank, your searches find documents regardless of their publication dates. To limit results to a particular range of publication dates, type the start date, a hyphen, and the end date. Use this format for dates: four digits for year, two digits for month, and two digits for day. For example, to limit search results to documents published in January 1995, type 19950101-19950131

All Issue Numbers link: Click on this link to view a list of all the issues of Physical Review Letters online. In that list, click on an Issue link to view a list of the documents in any issue.

All Document Titles link: Click on this link to view a list of all the documents in all the issues of Physical Review Letters online, with the newest documents listed first.

WordList link: Click on this link to view the WordList form. It lets you view a list of all the Physical Review Letters online search words. From the WordList, you select a search word and EJO displays a list of the documents containing that word.

Using Indexes

Physical Review Letters online has indexes that let you specify the document parts to search more precisely than the Search Type buttons do. To use the indexes, be sure that none of the Search Type buttons is selected. (Click on your browser's Reload button if one of the buttons is selected.) Then include the index label when you type your search words.

INDEX/DOCUMENT PART          TYPE       LABEL   SEARCH WORDS EXAMPLE

All indexes                  keyword/   al:     al:antiresonance
                             phrase
Basic                        keyword    bi:     bi:electromagnetic w transparency
Abstract                     keyword    ab:     ab:electromagnetic w transparency
Author                       keyword    au:     au:brown
Author                       phrase     au=     au=brown james l
Author affiliation           keyword    af:     af:yale university
Cited author                 keyword    ca:     ca:brown
Cited author                 phrase     ca=     ca=brown james l
Cited publication            keyword    cp:     cp:phys rev lett
Current Rapid Comunications  keyword    cr:     cr:bethe
Current Rapid Comunications  phrase     cr=     cr=bethe-like lattice calculations
Date of publication          keyword    dp:     dp:19950705
Date received                keyword    dr:     dr:19950701
Document number              keyword    dn:     dn:123456789
Document type                keyword    dt:     doping and dt:article
Figure caption               keyword    fg:     fg:reduced nuclear amplitudes
Footnotes                    keyword    fn:     fn:SLAC
PACS classification          keyword    pc:     pc:2530Bf
References                   keyword    rf:     rf:self-ionization w rev
Subject heading              keyword    sh:     sh:condensed
Subject heading              phrase     sh=     sh=condensed matter
Table title                  keyword    tb:     tb:power requirements
Title                        keyword    ti:     ti:phonons
Title                        phrase     ti=     ti=smectic-a films

No Stopwords

Some computer search systems have stopwords, words that are not indexed because they occur frequently and do not add to the subject content of the indexes; these cannot be entered as search words. However, there are no stopwords in Physical Review Letters online, so you do not need to exclude any words.

Using Search Limits

Document Types: You can limit the documents retrieved to any one of the document types listed below using the Document Type Search Limits box.

TYPE               DESCRIPTION

Reply              Comments and replies, refereed comments, submitted by
                   readers, about previously published articles, and the
                   authors' replies to such comments

Serial             Current Rapid Communications, bibliographic listing of the
                   Rapid Communications that have appeared in recent issues of
                   the Physical Review 

Editorial          Editorials, short articles that express the opinion of the
                   Editors or invited guests

Errata             Errata, corrections to previously published articles

Regular            Letters, refereed reports of research results and new
                   developments in the field

To view all types of documents, do not limit searches by document type. You can limit documents to a combination of document types using the document type (dt:) index label in your search instead of using the Document Type Search Limits box. You cannot use this index label alone; it must be combined with other indexes and terms using AND or NOT. For example, enter conductance and dt:(regular or errata).

Subject Headings: Subject headings are used in Physical Review Letters online results lists to identify documents by the subject area covered. You can limit the documents retrieved to any one of the subject headings listed below using the Subject Heading Search Limits box. To search all documents, do not limit searches by subject heading.

SUBJECT HEADING

Announcement
Atomic molecular "and" optical physics
Condensed matter electronic properties etc
Condensed matter structure etc
Cross-disciplinary physics
Current Rapid Communications
Editorial
Editorial note
Elementary particles "and" fields
General physics
Gravitation "and" astrophysics
Nonlinear dynamics fluid dynamics classical optics etc
Nuclear physics
Other general journal information
Plasma "and" beam physics

Publication Date: To limit the documents retrieved to documents published within a range of dates, use the Publication Dates Search Limits box.

You can also limit documents to a range of dates using the date of publication (dp:) index label in the Search For box. The date format is year, followed by month, followed by day. For example, to retrieve documents published during the period March 15 through 31, 1995, include and dp:19950315-19950331 in the Search For box.

August 4, 1995b