UT Southwestern: Search Help

How does the search work?

Search Function Definitions:

Global - Searches the entire site and is located at the top of each page in the header. This search includes Find a Doctor and Find Faculty, as well as static documents and web pages contained in the UT Southwestern site.

General – Located in the Faculty Directory and Find Faculty will search all relevant fields. Relevant fields include:
Searchable Fields for Find A Faculty: Searchable Fields for Find A Doctor:
  • First Name
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  • First Name
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  • Last Name
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  • Last Name
  • Administrative Title
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  • Specialty
  • Academic Title
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  • Department
  • Department
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  • Insurance
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  • School Affiliation
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  • Languages Spoken
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  • Program
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  • Gender
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  • Research Interest
  • Clinical Centers
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  • Research Summary
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  • Affiliated Hospitals
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  • Clinical Interests

    • Specific - Located in the Faculty Directory and Find Faculty will search all relevant fields, but will limit the search to the applicable field. For list of relevant fields see “General Search” above.

    UT Southwestern's search engine is a database information retrieval system. The search engine matches search terms to fields we have been identified as relevant data within the UT Southwestern web site. Your search results will include documents with exact word matches as well as documents with partial matches, and will search within documents to find relevant matches. A specific-based search enables you to retrieve information from specific fields and will display partial matches. A general search will search all relevant fields and return exact matches unless specified with search idiom.

    The Specific Search and Global Search engine also uses "stemming" on many words. For example, a query on "coughing" would retrieve any results that include the stem "cough." A query on legs would also retrieve articles containing the term leg. Stemming can be applied to the General Search with the use of wildcards. Wildcards can shorten your search strings, and return more results.

    Use wildcards for words with more than one ending on sites that support it. Psych* will return more results than just Psychiatry. *Psych* will return even more results than the previous search and include anti-psychotic.

    How results are displayed: In the search results for the Faculty Directory and Find a Doctor, the results are displayed alphabetically. For Global Search most relevant categories are displayed first, based on the relevance score for all the pages and documents found within that category, and then alphabetized. Under the categories, the results are displayed in order of relevancy of the documents and pages found.

    Case of Search Terms: The search engine matches words regardless of case. For example, a search on "Medical Library" will also retrieve results containing "medical library."

    International Spellings: The search engine treats foreign language terms with accent symbols in the standard normalized fashion as follows:

    For example, a Spanish query of formación can be typed as "formacion" and will retrieve documents that include the term " formación " or " formacion."

    Stop words: The search engine ignores words that occur very frequently in documents. These words include:

    Spelling: The search engine checks words against terms collected from the web site. Misspelled words will not be found unless the misspelled word has been included as a search term in the page keywords.

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    What do the categories mean?

    Is Boolean searching allowed?

    The following operators are available to you: AND, OR, NOT, *, +

    AND

    Use "AND" when you want both concepts to appear in all results. This search uses the conceptual model, so the documents retrieved may not have the exact word in the search.

    OR

    Use "OR" when you want either concept to appear in the results. This search uses the conceptual model, so the documents retrieved may not have the exact word in the search.

    NOT

    Use "NOT" when you do not want a particular concept to appear in the results.

    *

    Use "*" as a wildcard to find all related words to a particular prefix (e.g "neo*" would find neoplasms, neoplastic, etc). The conceptual model is not used in this search, so only variations of the exact word searched will be found.

    +

    Use "+" when you want the exact word to appear in the results. For multiple words, you must use put a + sign in front of every word you want to match. (e.g. +lipitor +cholesterol). The conceptual model is not used in this search, so stemmed variants of the exact word searched will be found.

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    What types of files are searched?

    The search engine finds these file types:

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    What if I get a message saying no results found for the search?

    There are a few reasons why you could have received this message:

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    What if help doesn't answer my question?

    If this help does not answer your questions, contact Internet Services and we will do our best to help you.

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