This unique tool allows you to search the philosophy literature using keywords graded for relevance.
Enter words or phrases in the appropriate boxes belows. The more the better.
Use double quotes for multi-word phrases such as "externalism about content".
Search is not case-sensitive. Words of less than four characters are ignored.
Outside double quotes, you can use * at the end of a word to match all words beginning with it. For example, "dualis*" matches both "dualism" and "dualist".
You can load an example search to see how this all works:
Instructions
In this search mode, you cannot use * and +. You need to spell out all relevant variations on a word. The exception are words ending in -ism, -ist, or -ists, which will automatically be expanded with all three variations. For example, entering "dualism" is equivalent to entering "dualism dualist dualists" without expansion.
You can specify up to two mandatory keywords sets. Only entries which match at least a word in each specified set will be returned.
Relevance keywords are used primarily to determine the ranking of entries. You must enter something there or tick the "append words from mandatory sets" option. If you enter phrases in this box (strings in double quotes), they will be treated like separate words.
The right way to use this tool is to specify mandatory sets then add additional words to the relevance keywords.
You can repeat words for emphasis. A word repeated n times will count n times as much as it would otherwise. (Keep in mind that the "append words from mandatory sets" option can create duplicates.)
Mandatory keyword sets
Double quotes allowed here to match multi-word strings.
Entry contains at least one of these words:
AND
Entry contains at least one of these words:
Relevance keywords
These keywords primarily determine the ranking of entries. You must either specify words here or use the mandatory keywords from above instead. You can also do both.
Append words from mandatory keyword sets (above) to this list.
Keywords
These words must appear in the results:
Use sparingly. Most words are better put in the box below. You can group words using parentheses. "(Word1 Word2) (Word3 Word4)" will restricted results to entries containing (Word1 or Word2) and (Word3 or Word4).
These words are excellent indicators of relevance:
If searching for papers about a given view, you want to put its name and those of alternative views here. Typically, you want dualis*, not dualism.
These words are good indicators of relevance:
These words are indicators of irrelevance:
Use to weed out entries about topics you are not interested in. If you use sufficiently many positive indicators (above), you will not need many terms here.
Date
Return works published between
-
e.g.,
1996
Other
Added or less ago.
professional authors only
online only
free only
published only
Minimal relevance (ignore if unsure): . (?)
Save this search as: (You must sign in to save searches.)
Saved searches are accessible from the "my profile" menu. They can be used as RSS feeds or to automatically supply entries for a bibliography, among other things.
