Help:Screen:AdvancedSearch

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

The Advanced Search page contains the following three sections:

• Custom Searches of Individual Record Types. This section is a list of links to Web pages that let users search the primary ISFDB records: authors, titles, series, publications, publishers, publication series, award types, award categories and awards. All record-specific search pages allow the user to select up to six search terms which can be joined using "AND" or "OR". For each term the user can specify one of the following matching criteria: "is exactly", "is not exactly", "contains", "does not contain", "starts with", "ends with". Selecting certain search criteria in the left column restricts the choices in the right column to a drop-down list. For example, selecting "Juvenile" or "Non-Genre" in the left column of the Advanced Title Search results in the right column values being restricted to "Yes" and "No".

• Other Searches. This section is a list of links to Web pages that let users perform specialized searches.
  • Publication Search by External Identifier. Takes the name of an external identifier type and an ID and looks for all publications that share that ID.
  • User Search. Takes the exact name of one ISFDB user and looks for that user's name in the database. If found, it displays the user's moderator flag ("yes" or "no") and the user's last activity date. The latter is the last date when the user edited the database, edited the ISFDB Wiki or verified a publication.
  • Notes Search. Lets the user search the Note fields of all ISFDB records for an arbitrary value at the same time. It also searches the Synopsis field of Title records.
  • Web Page Search. Lets the user search the Web Page fields of all ISFDB records for an arbitrary value.

• Search ISFDB Using Google. Lets the user select a record type (author, title, series, etc) and search them for an arbitrary value using Google. The main advantage of this way of searching is that Google supports approximate searches. The main disadvantage is that Google's data can be up to a few weeks out of date.