Oxford Analytica - Client Area - Help

Simple Search Help create simple search now

At its simplest, the simple search functionality allows you to enter any words in the query box, hit Search, and see results.

Options

Query: the primary words or phrase you are interested in. Advanced text options may be used.
Match: your query can match any words, all words or a phrase.

Note that if you select "any words" and use relevance ranking (below), then hits with all words are likely to appear above hits with any words.

Time span: you may limit your search to more recent articles.
Story type:
- All story types
- Executive summaries - single paragraphs referencing past, present or future articles
- Articles - full length articles, usually around 1000 words
Sort results by:
- Relevance - an algorithm is applied to try to pick only the most relevant results for your search. Items from the last 90 days are also given extra priority.
- Date - results are returned in date order, most recent first.

Detailed Search Help create detailed search now

The detailed search allows you to focus your search by country or topic keywords, by title or freetext keyword, or a combination of them. If information is entered in more than one box, then it will be and-ed. I.e, if you put Russia in the countries box and oil in the topics box, your search results will be on items about Russian oil.

Countries: Type any of Oxford Analytica's country keywords, or use the Select countries link to select them from a list.
- You can AND countries together, e.g. United States AND Russia finds items which are about both the United States AND Russia.
- If you don't AND countries together, it will be assumed you want matches on any country, so United States Russia finds matches on United States OR Russia.
Topics: Like countries, type any of Oxford Analytica's topic keywords, or use the Select topics link to select them from a list.
Primary keywords: Allows you to narrow your searching of countries and topics only to those items which are most tightly associated with the relevant keywords.
Titling: Search titles and headlines for a word or phrase. Use double quotes around phrases, e.g. "interest rates". See below for more options.
Freetext: Search for text anywhere in an item. Use double quotes around phrases, e.g. "interest rates". See below for more text search options.
From date and To date: Specify specific dates for a search
Story type:
- All story types
- Executive summaries - single paragraphs referencing past, present or future articles
- Articles - full length articles, usually around 1000 words

Further Search Options

Boolean Options

These can be used anywhere in the query field in Simple Search and Advanced Search, and the Countries, Topics, Titling and Freetext fields of Detailed Search. A term is a search unit, like a word or a phrase.

Terms can be ANDED together, e.g. "interest rates" AND bank in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain both the phrase "interest rates" and the word bank.
If you don't use AND to link them, then they will be assumed to be OR-ed together, e.g. "interest rates" bank in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain either the phrase "interest rates" or the word bank or both.
Excluding terms: if you use NOT to link terms, then documents will be found matching one but not another, e.g. in the Country field of Detailed Search, entering United Kingdom NOT United States will find articles keyworded United Kingdom but not keyworded United States.
Brackets may be used to group Boolean terms, e.g. ("interest rates" bank) NOT "Federal Reserve" in the Simple Search query field will find documents which contain either the phrase "interest rates" or the word bank, but do not contain the phrase Federal Reserve.
Simple Search and Advanced Search only: if you are returning results by relevance, you may boost the importance of a particular term or terms in the search. For example, "Bank of England"^4 "United Kingdom" economy in Simple Search while choosing Sort by Relevance will give extra priority to the results containing Bank of England.

Text Search Options

In open text fields, such as the query field in Simple Search, the titling and freetext fields in Detailed Search, and throughout in Advanced Search, you may use the following advanced text options to be more selective about what you match.

Use quote marks (") to search for phrases, e.g. "interest rates".
Wildcarding: ? represents any single character, * 1 or more characters. Note that our search engine supports stemming, so there is no need to do econom* to find both economy and economic. E.g. Col?mbia would find both Colombia and Columbia in free text.
Proximity searching: the tilde character (~) can be used to find words within a set distance of each other. To find economic within 10 words of policy, you would use: "economic policy"~10. Note that the quotes are obligatory, the syntax is "word1 word2"~how near they must be.

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Advanced Search Help create advanced search now

Most typical searches can be easily constructed using Detailed Search, and complex email alerting profiles can be built using multiple saved searches.

Only the most specific of queries therefore will need to use Advanced Search. All the options excepting the query field are the same as for Simple Search. The only real difference is that the query field allows you to match across the different fields we use to index our documents. So every term you enter in Advanced Search must specify a field to search in, followed by a colon, followed by the search term.

An example: to find documents matching either a topic or a country keyword, in this case either oil or OPEC, you would use this syntax: country:OPEC topic:oil. Here are some other examples:

on oil or Iraq or Saudi Arabia - country:Iraq country:Saudi Arabia topic:oil
with Shell in the body text and oil in the titling or topic keywords - textcontent:Shell AND (titling:oil topic:oil)
with economy as a topic keyword, and with interest rates in the titling, and with United Kingdom as a country keyword or Bank of England anywhere in the text - topic:economy AND titling:"interest rates" AND (textcontent:"Bank of England" country:United Kingdom)

Here is a complete list of the fields that may be used for searching in Advanced Search

country: as per Detailed Search's Country field
topic: as per Detailed Search's Topic field
primarycountry: as per Detailed Search's Country field if you had search primary keywords checked
primarytopic: as per Detailed Search's Topic field if you had search primary keywords checked
titling: as per Detailed Search's Titling field
textcontent: as per Detailed Search's Freetext field
headline: specifically searches only the headline
isfree: whether a document is restricted to clients only, in which case isfree will have the value "false", or fully available more widely, in which case isfree will have the value true.

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