Search Strategies for Database Advisor

This page explains the precise technical search strategies used and fields searched for each database in Database Advisor. For help in formulating the best search strategy to meet your needs, consult the help files provided by the database you have chosen. Your own use of these databases may produce results that differ from DBA's if your search strategy differs from ours. Our goal in designing these search strategies was to try to achieve an an equivalent search of title words, abstract words, and subject terms in each database. This was not always possible, of course, because of the differences in the fields available and the way in which each database searches these fields.

To achieve uniformity across databases, DBA's search strategies are by necessity rather generic. In many cases more precise searches can be performed in each database. Database Advisor guides you in choosing a database, it does not perform the most precise search possible in each database. We recommend that you refine your search as appropriate for each database you use.

There are two types of databases that DBA searches. The search strategy for each type is discussed below, along with a list of the databases that fall in each catagory.


Z39.50 - This is a type of database request protocol. It is specialized for retrieving data and is also a fast interface. Most of the MELVYL® databases are hooked up to a Z39.50 interface. All databases that we access via Z39.50 are searched the same way. In the case of MELVYL databases, our search replicates a FIND KEYWORD search.

Web Search Strategies - The MELVYL keyword search is what we considered "ideal". It searches for any of the search terms in any of the following fields: subject, title, and abstract. Each of the search terms must be present in at least one field, but need not be present in all fields. Because most web databases search each field separately, this is difficult to duplicate without multiple searches on the same topic. At times, we were forced to AND the search terms together and perform a boolean OR between the search fields. This requires all the words to appear in at least one field, which is more restrictive than the MELVYL keyword search. We hope that this will yield the best results to the user. Database specific strategies are listed below.
Available source code