How to Search INSPEC: Keyword Search

This is a good place to start your search if you are not familiar with this database.

Type your keywords in the search box. This is a search for the words in the abstract, title, and publisher's index terms.

To truncate your search terms, use ! for unlimited characters and * for one character. Use Boolean operators AND or OR to add more terms.  
For example:

• Business and internet and secur! and algorithm*
  where secur! retrieves secure, secured, security, etc and algorithm retrieves algorithm or alogrithms.
• (business* and (internet or web) or ecommerce
• INSPEC uses a Thesaurus, a copy is available at SCREF1 (Z699.5 Phy.It).

When performing a keyword search where you need to identify all the synonyms, variant spelling and punctuation associated with each concept to ensure that all relevant records are retrieved.  However sometimes using too many synonyms may result in irrelevant records as well. This can be overcome this by using the controlled indexing field search.

Click on Search.

While Viewing the search results, take note of the controlled indexing terms for all the relevant articles.

Conduct another search using those controlled indexing terms identified.