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Search Tips

Performing a Search

The Clearinghouse Search Form performs keyword searches on Clearinghouse website content. This allows the user to search Clearinghouse content for a list of user-supplied terms. The search will return results where any or all of the keywords exist. If quotes are used around the search words (search phrase), only the records where the exact phrase occurs will be included in the search results.

AND, OR, NOT: You may use the modifiers AND, OR, and NOT. For example, engineer AND mechanical NOT electrical will return search results for engineer and mechanical but ignore results containing electrical. These operative words ARE case-sensitive

Special/Wildcard Characters: The following special (non-alphabetic) characters are permitted within the search field: . , : ; ? & " ' $ @ # _ – + * = / \ ( ) [ ] ~. Some special characters perform specific functions within the Clearinghouse Search Form. Only use the characters identified below in your search if you require these special functions. Please use only lowercase letters in searches containing wildcard characters.

  • Question mark (?): Specifies any single alphanumeric character. For example, cyp1?1 will return results containing both CYP1A1 and CYP1B1.
  • Asterisk (*): Specifies zero or more alphanumeric characters. For example, eng* will return results containing both eng and engineering. Avoid using the asterisk as the first character in a search term.
  • Tilde (~): Specifies the proximity of search terms in search results by defining the allowed distance between search words. This functionality is available only with phrase searching (words must be contained within double quotes). For example, "environmental data"~4 will return records in which "environmental" and "data" appear in the record within four words of each other.

Limits: Use the checkboxes on the Clearinghouse Search Form to restrict or widen your search to specific parts of the website.

Search Results

Search results are displayed in order of relevance. Results where terms appear more frequently and closer together will be returned above results where terms appear less frequently.

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