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ORA: Oxford University Research Archive: Searching ORA

A guide to using ORA for storing and disseminating digital copies of Oxford research publications including theses

Search tips

 ORA search bar

Where possible full text searching is enabled in ORA records. The search box in ORA is used to enter the search string, which could be a title, partial title, author name, and identifier (such as DOI), department name, author, or other keyword/phrase.

Some Boolean terms can be used to assist with searching such as 'AND' or 'NOT', and these are detailed further below.

Boolean terms

AND - retrieves items that include all the terms entered, the & symbol can also be used (example: rotation AND magnetic) 

NOT - excludes any items that contain this term (example: rotation NOT magnetic: rotation will be searched but not magnetic)

BUT - allows you to specify one word and exclude another (example: rotation BUT NOT magnetic) which will provide search results for records that contain the word rotation but not those that contain rotation and magnetic together

 

 

The search box searches all fields by default, but can be limited to three specific fields: Title, Author, or Keyword; using the search box options drop-down.

Selecting the magnifying glass icon at the end of the search box performs the search as does 'return' as a keyboard action. To browse all ORA content perform a empty search by selecting the magnifying glass with no search text. 

Facets and filters

Once a search has been performed the left hand side facets can be used to further filter search results.

Using the "File Availability" facet to restrict results to "Available" will provide only search results for ORA records where a file is available to be downloaded from the repository directly. 

Stop words

'Stop words' are common words which do not (generally) add value in searching and are excluded.  

ORA's stop words are: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, in, is, it, its, of, on, that, the, to, was, were, will, with.

Oxford Research Archive (ORA)

 

 

 

 

 

ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) is the institutional repository for the University of Oxford and is home to the scholarly output of its research members. 

Contact us at: ora@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, or via our contact form.