With the advanced search option (available in Dimensions Analytics only) in the web application, Dimensions offers two ways of formulating more complex, keyword-based search queries:
Search in specific metadata fields
In addition to running keyword searches within several search indices such as "full data" or "title and abstract", both of which include a range of metadata fields, Dimensions also allows you to restrict your search to specific metadata fields only, for example in the title, acknowledgements, author names or certain date ranges or bibliometric indicators.
How to use the "search fields" option
To access this feature, click into the search box at the top, then on "Advanced" at the bottom-right below the search box. Next steps:
- Select a search field from the drop-down menu.
- Enter a value (for example a date range), a keyword, a phrase (enclosed by quotation marks) or a Boolean query (using AND, OR or NOT) in the text box below.
- Click "Add" to add this partial query to the overall query in the search box on the left.
- Click "Search" at the bottom to run your query.
You can also combine queries in multiple fields with each other by selecting additional fields from the drop-down menu and choosing a Boolean operator to connect this search to your existing query. The automatically set parentheses help you create sensible Boolean nesting. For all parts of the query where no specific search field is specified the search mode selected at the bottom of the window will be used ("Full data" or "Title and abstract").
Available fields and content types
The fields that are available in the advanced search are listed in the table below. More fields will be added over time to support further use cases. We are also working on making existing fields available in more content types, such as the research organization search for clinical trials and patents.
| Field name [technical name] | Description | Example | Available in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acknowledgements acknowledgements | The acknowledgements section text as found in the source document. | acknowledgements:(Horizon 2020) | Publications |
| Altmetric Attention Score altmetric | The Altmetric Attention Score is a weighted count of all of the online attention Altmetric have found for an individual research output. This includes mentions in public policy documents and references in Wikipedia, mainstream news, social networks, blogs and more. | altmetric:[50 TO *] | Publications Clinical Trials |
| Date - Inserted date_inserted | Date when the document has been first created in Dimensions. Note: Documents appear at least several days after they have been created. | date_inserted:[2022-01-01 TO 2022-01-31] | Publications Datasets Grants Clinical Trials Policy Documents Reports |
| Date - Publication date | The publication date of a document, e.g. “2018-01-01”. Note: dates can sometimes be incomplete and include only the month or the year. | date:[2020-01-01 TO *] | Publications |
| Exact search full_data_exact | Search for keywords in the full text of a publication. This search index is not normalized (stemmed) and can be used when searching for exact terminology, such as gene names, chemical compounds, etc. | full_data_exact:(gene NOT genes) | Publications |
| ISBN isbn | International Standard Book Number (online and print). | isbn:978-3-030-80701-6 | Publications |
| ISSN issn | International Standard Serial Number (online and print). | issn:1476-4687 | Publications |
| MeSH terms mesh_terms | Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from PubMed / MEDLINE. | mesh_terms:(Neural Networks) | Publications Clinical Trials |
| Number of affiliation countries country_count | Count of identified affiliation countries in a publication. | country_count:[2 TO 10] | Publications |
| Number of affiliations org_count | Count of identified researcher affiliations in a publication | org_count:[1 TO 1] | Publications |
| Number of authors authors_count | Count of authors, as they appear in the original document. | authors_count:[* TO 40] | Publications |
| Number of citations citations | Publication citations is the number of times that a publication has been cited by other publications in the database. Citing publications can be of any publication type, such as articles, chapters, preprints, or monographs. | citations:[100 TO *] | Publications |
| Research organization org_names_raw | Raw names of the organizations researchers are affiliated to as well as awarded organizations. Note: we automatically create complex proximity searches for searches in this field in the background so that, for example, a search for "Harvard Chemistry" will automatically find results with "Dept. of Chemistry, Harvard University" or "Harvard University Department of Chemistry" as well as other permutations. | org_names_raw:"Department of Physics" | Publications [Grants - planned] |
| Research organization ID org_id | GRID ID of the (disambiguated) organization | org_id:grid.26999.3d | Publications |
| Title title | The title of a document. | title:("climate change" OR "global warming") | Publications Datasets Grants Patents Clinical Trials Policy Documents Reports |
| Title, abstract, claims title_abstract_claims | Search within title, abstract and claims fields of a patent record. | title_abstract_claims:("foldable screen") | Patents |
Additional information about keyword searches in the full data or title and abstract indices can be found in How to search in Dimensions.
Search using auto-suggested co-occurring concepts
With this option, you can ask Dimensions to suggest terms and concepts co-occurring with the keywords you're looking for. You can start by either using one or more keywords or phrases to perform a search and then refine your query using "Advanced" > "Concepts", or - with the search box empty - simply click on "Advanced" and then "Concepts" to start building your query by entering one or more search terms in the pop-up window and then clicking "Recalculate concepts" on the right-hand side for further suggestions. Click on "Add" to add a term or phrase to your query; by default, this will be done using Boolean AND, but you may change the operator to OR or NOT and/or use additional term modifiers (see above). Finally, select if you'd like to search in the full text or title and abstract only and click "Search" to run the search.
