'Good search queries' cheat sheet

For more details, please see Methods for making good search queries.

1. Don't make your search queries too specific

Rather than searching for biopolymer fiber wound dressing, search for biopolymer* AND wound*.

2. Searching is not about what you want to find. Rather, it is about how other people most likely talk about what it is that you want to find.

If you want to find energy scavenging technologies but everybody else uses the term power harvesting instead, search for power harvesting.

3. Generalize

Rather than searching for fullerene, search for nanomaterial* OR nanoparticle* OR nanopowder*.

Rather than searching for deep reinforcement learning, search for machine learning.

4. Application

The method: image sharpening OR deconvolution.

The application: imaging proteins at high resolution.

Searching for the application be protein* AND imaging AND high-resolution.

5. Property

The material: aluminum alloy OR aluminum alloys.

The properties: light-weight and strong.

Searching for the properties could be light-weight OR lightweight AND strong.

Use e.g. emerging technologies or patent class tag clouds to narrow down the results (these might be noisy because unrelated materials or technologies may have the same properties as the ones you are after).

6. Emerging technologies tag cloud

You can use emerging technologies tag clouds for all contents. For details, see How 'Mergeflow Emerging Tech' topics help you discover and explore.

7. Patent class tag cloud

Use patent classes for patents but also for non-patents. Mergeflow's analytics assigns patent classes to non-patents as well. For details on this, see Using patent classes for concept search.