Advanced Searching

The ACM Digital Library is a powerful tool and to best leverage all the available features, start searching in the Advanced Search mode.


Screenshot of the ACM Digital Library homepage featuring a prominent search bar in the center. A red arrow points to the "Advanced Search" link located beneath the search bar on the right-hand side. 

Searching

Advanced search interface of the ACM Digital Library. Options include a dropdown to select the search source (“The ACM Full-Text collection”), a “Search Within” field with a text box for entering search terms, and additional filters such as “Published in” with options to match all terms. A link to saved searches is shown above.

Searching with AND

If you wanted to search for "charles lutwidge dodgson logic" where all terms were searched together, you would structure your search like the following:

charles AND lutwidge AND dodgson AND logic

which would retrieve results that used all of those words somewhere in the title, abstract or body of the text.

 

Searching with OR

To complete the same search, looking for any of the terms "charles lutwidge dodgson logic," you would separate your terms with OR:

charles OR lutwidge OR dodgson OR logic

and therefore would harvest a greater number of results, but results that are less likely to be about Charles Lutwidge Dodgon and logic.

 

Searching with NOT

This option works completely differenlty than the other two.  Any text that precedes NOT will automatically be excluded from your results.  You could search something like this:

(Charles AND lutwidge AND dodgson) NOT (Linear Algebra)

to find information about Dodgson's mathematics, but remove any results relating to linear algebra

Is it relevant?

Click on the item's title to learn more about the article! 

Screenshot of a research article titled "Towards Developing Uniform Lexicon Based Sorting Algorithm for Three Prominent Indo-Aryan Languages." The authors' names are listed with an "Authors Info & Claims" link circled in red on the right. The "Publication History" link is also circled near the bottom.

When you're browsing a list of results, try clicking on an article's title to find helpful information.

Authors Info & Claims: Click on this link to find out more information regarding the authors, including affiliated institutions and past publications. 

Publication History: Follow the Publication History link to find out more information related to the article and the publisher, such as journal information and author tags. 

Screenshot of the abstract section for a research article discussing the development of a lexicon-based sorting algorithm for Bengali, Hindi, and Nepali languages. A red circle highlights the Bibliometrics & Citations icon on the vertical toolbar to the right of the abstract text.

You can also find out more information about the impact and use of your selected article by following the Bibliometrics & Citations link. Here, you can find additional articles that have cited this article, which allows you to build your base of literature.