What can I enter in the search field?

You can enter an expression, several expressions, the name of an author, a year of publication, a journal abbreviation, or combinations thereof. LIGHTS will combine two or more words using “and”.

Do I have to care about spelling?

So and so. LIGHTS will take care of the following:

  • Plural/ singular. LIGHTS will automatically search for plural and singular.
  • Dashes. LIGHTS will treat dash-separated expressions as two words combined with “and”.
  • Stemming. If you enter randomization, for instance, LIGHTS will search for all words starting with random*.

LIGHTS does currently not take care of the following variants:

  • British / American spelling
  • Alternative spellings for special signs such as ü (can also be written as ue)

Can I use parentheses, quotation marks, or any other search operators?

LIGHTS does currently not support search operators.

What happens when I hit find?

The search engine will scan the following fields: title, abstract, author keywords, author, journal, and year of publication. In addition, it will search index terms that we manually added (shown in facets), synonyms for those index terms (not shown), and narrower topics (not shown).

LIGHTS will apply the following hierarchy for ordering the search results:

  • Matches in index terms including synonyms
  • Matches in titles
  • Matches in authors, journals, author keywords
  • Matches in abstracts

Within those categories, LIGHTS will sort matching articles by publication date, most recent on top.

Can I browse index terms, alternative terms, and hierarchies?

This feature is not available yet. Once the taxonomy has sufficiently matured, we plan to make it accessible.

How do the search facets work?

The search facets are either based on index terms that we manually assign (study type, methodological topic, medical context, guidance type, development process) or automatically processed bibliographic meta-data (author, publication date, journal).

Some search facets are very long. If you cannot see all index terms, you may search for them directly in the facet.

Click on the heart symbol to mark an article as a favorite. LIGHTS will remember your choices using the local storage of your browser.

Can I export the search results?

This feature is currently not available.

Need further assistance?

Email us.