Search hints

About Basic search
About Advanced search
General search hints
Truncation
Display of search results

The SIPRI library web catalogue has two search options: Basic search and Advanced search.

One search field where you enter one or more words from the search fields titel, authors/editors, keywords, isbn, issn and acquisitionnumber. You may enter search terms from one category or make a combined search, i.e. entering words from both title and author.

In the Basic search form the Boolean operator AND is automatically activated when you type two or more words with a space between them.

Separate search fields for all available search categories. Enter one or several search terms.

In the Advanced search field you may choose either of the Boolean operators AND and OR. If you do not choose an operator your terms are automatically combined using AND.

You can use upper or lower case letters: "security" will find "security", "Security" and "SECURITY".

Use quotation marks to seach for exact phrases: a search for "chemical disarmament" within quotation marks will render fewer hits than without.

Use the * symbol (asterisk) as a substitute for zero or more characters to find matches that contains portions of words or phrases. Be careful not to truncate too far, or you will retrieve unrelated terms.

"*missiles" will retrieve entries for all documents ending with the word missiles, for exampel "ballistic missiles", ”cruise missiles” etc.

Right-hand truncation
"chemic*" will retrieve entries for all documents containing words or phrases beginning with chemic, for example "chemicals", "chemical disarmament" etc. Right-hand truncation is automatically activated in the catalogue so you do not have to truncate in these cases.

Embedded truncation
You may also use the * symbol to find variant spellings within words: "defen*e" will find both "defence" and "defense".

In both Basic search and Advanced search you may choose to display the results of your search in a short or long format.

Display in short format shows the most important bibliographical data without keywords.

Display in long format shows the same bibliographical data including keywords. If you do not make an active choice the record will automatically be displayed in the short format.

To receive the Complete record of bibliographical data you can click on the underlined title. Complete record shows all available bibliographical data.