This article explains Basic Search, for an article explaining our Advanced Search, Click Here.
One of the fundamental benefits of using LabArchives is the ability to easily search through your Notebook to locate important data that you have stored. LabArchives enables users to search not just textual entries, but also the text of many types of file attachments, including text, Microsoft Office documents, and PDFs. These data are all indexed, so retrieval is extremely rapid. The Search bar is depicted below.
Search Methods
Searching may be accomplished using a single word, a string of words, or using more complex Boolean connectors such as “And”, “Or”, or “Not”, as well as quoted phrases.
After executing a simple search, LabArchives will retrieve Entries that contain any of the terms and display in the order of relevance. This order is based upon the frequency of terms appearing in the document. For example, if you search for mutant mouse ENU, you will see entries that contain any of these three words, whether in text or supported attachment types. Entries containing all three words will be displayed at the top of the list. Those with only two of the terms will be displayed below, followed by those with only a single term.
Note that LabArchives also uses stemming in the search process to expand a term as part of a larger term. So, for example, a search for the word “Flow” will also find “Flower” and “Flowers”. See the section on Quoted Searching if you do not want the term to be expanded.
Boolean Searches
You can use Boolean operators (and, or, not) by simply including it in your search string.
AND – searching for mouse AND enu, will only return entries with both terms.
OR – searching for mouse OR enu, will return entries with either term
NOT – searching for mouse NOT enu, will only return entries with “mouse”, but don’t include the word “enu“.
You can also do more complex searches by combining operators with terms, such as mouse AND enu NOT mutant, which will locate results with both “mouse” and “enu“, but not “mutant”. Note that these Boolean operators are always applied from left to right.
Quoted Searches
You can also make a search more precise by including the search term(s) in quotes. Searching for “Flow Cytometer” will only find results with that exact phrase. Likewise, searching for “Flow” will return entries with that exact work, it will not expand the results to “Flower”.
Note that you should avoid using “stop words” in literal searches which can often lead to unpredictable results. “Stop words” include short common words like “A” “and”, “do”, etc.