Help for Searching the Bibliography

Basic Search Techniques

The bibliography search works a little differently than a Google search or even the site search for this website. Below are some techniques and tricks for narrowing the bibliography data down.

The search function will look for the exact phrase that is typed into the text box and does not distinguish between words. Thus "karner blue" is a different search phrase than "karner blue " (with a space at the end), and both of these are different than searching for "blue karner" which probably will not return any results.
The search is not case sensitive so "Karner Blue" and "karner blue" are functionally equivalent.
To search for articles and resources available in hard copy at the library at the Michigan DNR office in downtown Lansing use the search phrase "*" (do not enter the quotes in the actual search phrase).

Tip: Plural forms

Say one wants to find all bibliography entries containing "Karner blue butterfly" and also the plural forms like "Karner blue butterflies" to be returned. To get all of these, one must use a search phrase like "karner blue butterfl" that is general enough to get just the desired entries.

Information Types

The search does not currently provide a means for targeting specific types of information like author names or publication dates. The bibliography is not really large enough to necessitate this feature either. The only caveat is that there might be a few entries that match the search phrase but not in the intended way.

Author names are usually unique enough that simply searching for all or part of a last name will return the relevant results. There are a couple of ways to search for ranges of dates. For instance to find an article written in the 1960's one could:

Search for each year individually
Use a search phrase like "196" which will return all of the entries containing 1960-1969

It is possible that searching for "196" will also return an article that begins or ends on page 196 of the journal. False posives such as this are usually easy to weed out, and due to the small size (from a computer search perspective) of the bibliography this should not be too much of a problem.

Search Results

The results are returned in alphabetical order by author last name regardless of search phrase. The search phrase is also highlighted in the results. If the search phrase is "ner blu", a result may appear as "...Karner blue butterfly..." If the search phrase is "fly" then our result would be "...Karner blue butterfly..." All occurrences of the search phrase in the bibliography entry are highlighted.

A nice feature of the bibliography search is the ability to bookmark search pages. This is done by putting the search information in the URL (i.e. the text in the long rectanglular box at the top of the web browser that usually begins "http:"). Bookmarks created from any page of any search will go back to the same exact page and search phrase; it is not necessary to repeat the search again. No cookies are used. The URL may be cut and pasted anywhere and the search should always return to the same page.

Searches using Quotes

Probably the best rule for doing searches involving quotation marks is not to. They are a headache and best be avoided, not to mention that there aren't many bibliography entries that have quoted phrases in them. If you must use them, then here's how. Instead of typing in the quote key on the keyboard (") use the html character code for the quotation marks:

Note that all html character codes begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). An example of searching for a phrase in quotes would be

which would return a page containing the term "microbial cost" (in quotes).

Have fun!
-NK