- This unique tool allows you to search the philosophy literature using keywords graded for relevance.
- Enter words or phrases in the appropriate boxes belows. The more the better.
- Use double quotes for multi-word phrases such as "externalism about content".
- Search is not case-sensitive. Words of less than four characters are ignored.
- Outside double quotes, you can use * at the end of a word to match all words beginning with it. For example, "dualis*" matches both "dualism" and "dualist".
- You can load an example search to see how this all works:
- In this search mode, you cannot use * and +. You need to spell out all relevant variations on a word. The exception are words ending in -ism, -ist, or -ists, which will automatically be expanded with all three variations. For example, entering "dualism" is equivalent to entering "dualism dualist dualists" without expansion.
- You can specify up to two mandatory keywords sets. Only entries which match at least a word in each specified set will be returned.
- Relevance keywords are used primarily to determine the ranking of entries. You must enter something there or tick the "append words from mandatory sets" option. If you enter phrases in this box (strings in double quotes), they will be treated like separate words.
- The right way to use this tool is to specify mandatory sets then add additional words to the relevance keywords.
- You can repeat words for emphasis. A word repeated n times will count n times as much as it would otherwise. (Keep in mind that the "append words from mandatory sets" option can create duplicates.)