Boolean Search Problem

rooots

Hi all,

I'm having problems with simple boolean searches for "Attachment Content" - "contains". For example, I want to find all attachments which contain both "carbon" and "oxide", but not necessarily as one phrase.
However, searching for "carbon AND oxide" (of course without "") won't yield any results no matter if I select 'phrase' or one of the 'regexp' options. Roughly two dozens of indexed PDFs contain both words, and both can be found by searching within the PDFs with a handful of PDF readers.

Am I missing something?!

Cheers,
r.

dstillman

Do you mean that you're searching for the literal phrase "carbon AND oxide"? That won't work. You can use boolean logic by using separate search conditions, in either ALL or ANY mode, and you can chain saved searches (from the Collection condition) to use more complicated boolean logic.

rooots

No, I'm searching for PDF attachments that contain both "carbon" and "oxide". Neither search strings "carbon oxide" nor "carbon AND oxide" (again, typed without quotation marks) yield any results for any of the search string options (phrase, regexp). Interestingly, one of the PDF even has both search words in the file name, but Zotero won't find it.

adamsmith

right, what you want to do is

Match all

attachment content -- contains -- carbon
attachment content -- contains -- oxide

rooots

Thanks, that does work indeed, but shouldn't this be exactly what the AND operator is for?!

adamsmith

The AND operator doesn't exist in Zotero. It's not a universal operator.

rooots

Oh, then I obviously misunderstood the documentation for Zotero advanced search, where the operators are - obviously - only used to illustrate the procedure.

Thanks!
r.