Complex Search Criteria

mszargar
Hello,

I would like to know how to search for items with titles containing "open source" or "free software" with Zotero's advanced search. When I define two search criteria in advanced search, one for "open source" and one for "free software", joining them with "any" operator, Zotero finds all the items with "open", "source", "software", and "free" in their titles. Is there any way to use boolean operators or regular expressions in Zotero's search or to confine the results to combined words by putting quotation marks around the search criteria like in Google?

Best,
Mah
  • Bionatsci
    This works fine for me, as far as I can tell with a few minutes testing your search takes the form:

    "open source" OR "free software"

    could you provide exact steps to reproduce your issue, together with examples of titles which are found but shouldn't be by your search?

    P.S. it could of course be that this was fixed between the 13th Aug and today.
  • mszargar
    Bionatsci,

    By entering your suggested expression in my search box I get only three articles, while I have at least tens of articles with "open source" mentioned in their titles. But this is not the problem. I need to have a saved search, so in the advanced search mode, showing me all the articles I have on a number of subjects, say "open source" and "free software". Now I put these two in two separate boxes in advanced search, preceded by "title contains", joined together by "any" operator. Then it almost catches everything! An example is "A bargaining perspective on strategic outsourcing and supply competition"!
  • Bionatsci
    edited August 31, 2009
    Sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean that my search string was the search string you should enter - quick search doesn't support that ATM. I meant that my search string represents the logic I appeared to be getting when I tried your advanced search out with some test items, it is certainly the case that on my setup items within a single (advanced) search box are treated as a phrase (to the point of needing the correct number of whitespaces between words to find anything). I'll have a look into it further. It is possible that this has changed between versions, which version of Zotero and which operating system are you currently using BTW?

    A possible workaround for the moment (I haven't tested this yet) is to string three saved searches together - one searching for "open source", one for "free software" (assuming these searches work ok on their own) and a third of the form "collection is saved search 1", "collection is saved search 2" linked by the "any" operator.

    @Dan or someone else in the know - What search logic would you expect for a query like this, and has it changed between versions? Thanks.
  • mszargar
    Sorry for the delay...

    I use Zotero on three machines, each one working on one platform (Linux, Mac OS, Windows) and it is the same on three of them.

    Your workaround is intelligent and useful for less complicated search criteria, but I have got more than ten of them. I guess Zotero needs a serious search engine letting for regular or at least logical expressions.

    Mah
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