How to search for articles that don't have an abstract?

andresmh · February 1, 2009

I want to be able to search for records where Abstract is empty. Kind of like
select * from articles where abstract = "" or abstract is null
How do I do that? If I leave the abstract field empty in the advanced search it returns nothing but I know I have articles with no abstract.

dstillman · February 1, 2009

[Abstract] [does not contain] [" "] (a space character, without the quotes) might do the trick.

fbennett · February 1, 2009

Checked this, and a search for [does not contain][" "] returns everything. The search
hash apparently doesn't record space characters.

Looking at this, I found this thread, suggesting a search for vowels. I ran a test on my own entries, some of which do not contain an entry in the Title field. I set advanced search to Match [all], and then set up five entries, one for each vowel, on the pattern [Title][does not contain][a]. I skipped the [i] in the sequence by accident the first time around, and added it at the end of the search terms list. The search returned some items (but only some) with vowels in the Title field. Odd. I then fixed the sequence to make it alphabetical (not a, not e, not i, not o, not u). This time, it returned the expected result (plus some entries with Japanese titles, but I expected that).

There's a gremlin in there someplace.

I agree that it would be useful to be able to search for entries in which a particular field is blank.

PS: This was using 1.5a1.r4041 with some local mods that should not affect the search machinery, but buyer beware.

dstillman · February 1, 2009

The [does not contain] search (with no other search conditions) seems to work fine for me. Items with abstracts aren't included in the results.

fbennett · February 1, 2009

Confirming that that works here, too. [Abstract][does not contain] + no value entered in the search field.

I do get returns to my Title test, but it's consistent, picking up entries that have notes appended to them. Searching for empty Titles is an odd use case anyway, so no big deal. The aeiou sequence thing is odd, but doesn't seem likely to have any real practical consequences.

For Abstract (and probably everything else) this works swimmingly.

dstillman · February 1, 2009

Sorry, I meant that [does not contain] plus a space works fine for me, in both advanced search window and saved search. [does not contain] with no value works in the advanced search window but returns all results in a saved search.

fbennett · February 1, 2009

Hmm. For Abstract, I get the expected results in advanced search with no value, and I get everything with " ". In saved search, both no value and " " return everything.

I wonder if the platform makes a difference? I'm using 1.5a1.r4041, and:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008121621 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.5