PLANEX Search Guide for JISC Users

Transcription

1 PLANEX Search Guide for JISC Users 2 nd Floor, 160 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BF T F E info@idoxgroup.com

2 Contents 1. Welcome to PLANEX Summary getting started Basic Search Advanced search Boolean searching Other search options Exact match Truncation Marking records... 9 Page 2 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

3 1. Welcome to PLANEX The IDOX Information Service has been in existence for over 30 years. Its bibliographic and abstract database, PLANEX, covers all the subject areas of local public policy and governance, such as: economic development town and country planning housing urban and rural regeneration transport tourism and leisure property development environment and nature conservation education and training social work and community health local government management The records PLANEX contains are made up from: journal articles books semi-published materials such as policies, strategies, plans, guidance, and consultation documents annual reports and reviews government publications web-published documents case studies The IDOX Information Service has arguably the most comprehensive database covering the issues concerning local government and its services in the UK, and is used by practitioners, academics and consultants to keep upto-date with current trends, identify policy and good practice and provide comprehensive background knowledge. Sources include over 400 practitioner and academic journals, government and other public bodies websites, mainstream publishers lists and its own network of users. Page 3 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

4 2. Summary getting started Type a few words into the search box, then press Enter or click the Search button. The system will retrieve records that contain all the words that you enter, omitting common words such as a, the, in, etc. To search for an exact phrase, put the words in inverted commas. If there are alternative words that could be used for your subject, place OR between the two words to search for records containing either or both terms. To exclude a word from a search, place NOT before the term. To truncate words, place an asterisk at the end, e.g. environment* will retrieve environment, environments, environmental and environmentally. Page 4 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

5 3. Basic Search The basic search will search in all fields. To search for an exact phrase, put the terms in inverted commas, e.g. local authorities. The results can be sorted by date, relevance or author, in descending or ascending order. Page 5 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

6 4. Advanced search The advanced search allows you to specify the particular fields in which you wish to search. You can search for terms in the title, author, publisher, ISBN, abstract, keywords and reference number fields. It is possible to search in up to two fields in addition to the main search box, e.g. you could search for records containing built environment, Anderson in the author field and housing in the abstract field. The advanced search offers the same sorting options as the basic search, and also allows you to restrict the results to a particular date range, either by year of publication or the date that the record was added to the database. The advanced search is particularly useful as it provides you with ways of eliminating irrelevant material, e.g. if you are only interested in current material you can use a date range to filter out older results. It is also possible to limit your results to journal articles by selecting the publisher field and typing journal article. Page 6 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

7 5. Boolean searching The search engine allows you to search using the Boolean operators AND (or the + symbol), OR and NOT (or the symbol). These examples demonstrate how Boolean operators work: will retrieve all records containing both the terms regeneration and renewal. NB the default operator for the search engine is AND, so will also retrieve all records containing both the terms regeneration and renewal. will retrieve all records containing either term and both terms. will retrieve records which contain the term regeneration, but do not also contain the term renewal. NB although NOT allows you to be more precise, in some cases it may cause you to miss relevant material. E.g. if you search for Scotland NOT England, you may miss documents on Scotland which feature both terms. It is possible to combine operators: will retrieve records containing the terms regeneration and built environment, renewal and built environment and records containing all three terms. Page 7 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

8 6. Other search options 6.1 Exact match The main search box searches for selected words with the same stem, e.g. a search for communication will retrieve documents containing communication, communicate, communicates and communicated. To search for documents containing an exact term, you put it in inverted commas. Therefore, will retrieve documents containing this exact word and not documents containing communities. 6.2 Truncation It is possible to truncate words by placing an asterisk at the point at which you wish to cut off the end of the word. The search engine will then look for words which start with the letters preceding the asterisk. This is particularly useful in the Author, Publisher, Shelf ID, Keywords and ISBN field searches, as, unlike the main search box, they use exact match as the default. E.g. will retrieve documents with Scot, Scotland, Scottish, etc. in the publisher field. Page 8 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

9 7. Marking records You can mark records from your results set to create a bibliography. To do this, click on the box next to each record that you wish to add, then click the View marked records box: The records you selected will then appear in a list, which you can save, print or . You can also display the full abstract for each record in the list by clicking on Full details. Page 9 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc

10 You can delete a record in the list by clicking on the dustbin icon next to it. NB When you are in the View marked records format, you cannot download documents. In order to get hold of a document that s on your list, click back to the Search Results page and access it from there. Page 10 of 10 Commercial in Confidence Idox plc