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History of Art Bibliography

Searching Tips

Boolean operators
To fine tune your search, you can use AND, OR, and NOT logical operators to link your search words together, and/or limit the search to a specific field. These operators will help you narrow or broaden your search to better express the terms you are looking for and to retrieve the exact information you need quickly.

  • USING THE “AND” OPERATOR (= intersection): If you have a search term that is too general, you can append several terms together using “AND”. By stringing key terms together, you can further define a specific search and reduce the number of results.
  • USING THE “OR” (= union) OPERATOR: In order to broaden a search, you can link terms together by using the “OR” operator. Linked by this operator, your words are searched simultaneously and independently of each other.
  • USING THE “NOT” OPERATOR (=exclusion): In order to narrow a search, you can link words together by using the “NOT” operator. This operator will help you to filter out specific topics you do not wish included as part of your search.

Note : In the writing of your request, use the boolean operators in their English form and in capital letters.

Faceted refining
Faceted refining allows to fine tune the results of a first search by using one or more criteria (the facets).
The list of facets appears on the search results page, on the left:

  • Filter: To select only records with abstract or to choose their origin : Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) or Répertoire d’Art et d’Archéologie (RAA) or Répertoire international de la littérature de l’art (RILA), produced by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Inist-CNRS) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI)
  • Publication year
  • Document Type
  • Language
  • Publication Country

These facets can be folded or unfolded by clicking on their title.
A click on the selected button at the level of a facet or a filter repeats the same search, to which the filter corresponding to the selected facet is added.
You can select several facets at the same time, with AND as logical operator between two selected facets, and OR as logical operator for two selected values inside a same facet. For example: “France” OR “United States” in the facet “Publication Country”.
You can sort by alphabetical order or by order of frequency if the number of results of the faceted search exceeds 10 for the filter and 20 for the other facets.

For further information, see: Refining the Results by Means of Facets

Bounce search
It is possible to rebound and launch a new search on a different criterion from the display of a record. Just click on a value shown in red (author, journal title, keywords…) in the displayed results.

Query formulation
In the event there are several slightly different spellings for a particular term (for example: organization or organisation), you can use the ? symbol to report the possibility of a variation: organi?ation.

To search for a group of terms precisely enter it between quotes (” “).
For example: “abolition of slavery”

Wildcards
Wildcard searches can be run on individual terms :
using ? to replace a single character
and * to replace zero or more characters.
Ex : bibliographi* allows to find the records containing the words «bibliography», «bibliographical» …

multiple ? are possible with one ? for each character.
So Bernst??n finds both Bernstein and Bernstien.
A minimum of three characters are required for a wilcard query, example bio*.
Be aware that wildcard queries can use an enormous amount of memory and perform very badly — just think how many terms need to be queried to match the query string "a* b* c*".
Wildcard at the beginning of a word (eg *ing) is particularly heavy, because all terms in the index need to be examined, just in case they match.
A minimum of three characters are required for a wilcard query, example bio*.

English stemming with the Porter’s algorithm is applied to the text fields and it is therefore not necessary to do a right truncation to search for the usual singular and plural forms
For example: bibliography give both bibliography and bibliographies.

Wildcard searches can not be run with exact phrase queries. "memor* museum" give zero document.

To overcome this limitation of the Elasticsearch search engine, see ; Search by Regular Expressions