Search Tips
First Time Users
Please browse this page to understand all of the options available to
you when you search our catalog of government science and technology web
sites. Of
special interest is how you can limit your search by subject as
well as by resource type.
These features are discussed below.
When you search for information on this site, you are searching a catalog
of web sites carefully selected to lead you to key sites in your area
of interest.
Subject Topic Lists
All SciTechResources.gov catalog entries are tagged with one or
more predefined subject topics. On our search pages, you can use a pull
down list to limit your search to one of these subject topics. By doing
this, your search will be more successful.
Selected
resource list [more
information]
Some
web sites have been tagged specifically to make it easy to quickly focus
in upon specific features such as maps, photographs, federal laboratories
and facilities, computer software, online databases, etc. You can select
these resources from a pull down list or key them directly as a keyword.
Agency and organization list 
You can limit your search to sites from specific government agencies and
organizations by selecting the appropriate group from the pull down list.
Some web resources that are funded by multiple agencies may not be searchable
using this list. Although suborganizations usually are not included on
this list, they can be searched using keywords.
Searching Individual Words
If you enter the words, air pollution, on the same line, you will find
all records where either of these words appear anywhere within
the record. The search engine is looking for a record that contains either
air or pollution. In order to find records with both words, you must put
an AND between the two words, e.g., air AND pollution, or enter the terms
on separate lines and select the AND delimiter.
Searching Keyword Phrases
If you enter the words, "air pollution", surrounded by quotation
marks, you will find all records where these two words appear together.
By putting quotation marks around words or a number series, you also can
search for a unique phrase. For example, to search for "high energy lasers",
search for "high energy" AND laser*. Without the quotation marks you cannot
search for words separated with spaces, hyphens, commas, or any other
punctuation marks.
Limiting your search
Boolean expressions are words like OR, AND, and ADJ used
to create relationships among the keywords in your search query. Below
is a list of expressions with their corresponding symbol (you may use
either) and function.
- air pollution
finds records with EITHER air OR pollution.
- air AND
pollution finds records with BOTH air AND pollution.
- air ADJ
pollution finds records with air followed by pollution.
- "air
pollution" finds records with air pollution as a phrase
Searching for part of a word,
Truncation
If you want to truncate a word, use the "*", e.g., environm*. This will
find records containing, environment, environmental, environments, etc.
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