Overton’s advanced search query builder has two modes: standard and expert. Both are designed to help you discover the policy documents and grey literature you need, whether you’re running a quick search on a new topic or building a precise, reproducible search.
What is standard mode?
Standard mode is the default view of Overton’s query builder. It lets you combine search terms using Boolean operators, match exact phrases, find terms that appear near each other, use truncation to capture word variants, and search by meaning using semantic search. While the default is to search within the full-text, you can also narrow your search to a single, specific field, such as title.
See: Advanced search: Standard mode
What is expert mode?
Expert mode is designed for more complex and precise searches. It uses an Embase-style query syntax, and gives you access to a much wider range of search fields and operators, all of which can be freely combined with each other using Boolean operators.
See: Advanced search: Expert mode
What are the differences between standard and expert mode?
You might be wondering which mode is right for you. Both offer a query builder and utilise similar building blocks, like Boolean operators, various search techniques and nested logic.
While standard mode may be enough for simple or highly defined topic searches, expert mode offers flexibility in how search techniques are combined, additional search fields and multi-field searching – functionality that can be useful for complex or systematic searches.
Standard mode is best for
- Simple searches, such as finding a policy document by title
- Specific, well-defined topics or phrases, rather than broad or general topics
- Finding documents that are conceptually similar, using semantic search
- Searching across a small set of common fields (eg. title)
- Users who don’t need to fine-tune every part of their query
Expert mode is best for
- Building complex, multi-concept searches with nested Boolean logic
- Reproducible, systematic searches you want to reuse or share
- Searching very specific fields like within AI generated document summaries or running multi-field searches
- Combining different search techniques together, such as truncation inside a phrase, or proximity combined with truncation and wildcards
- Users familiar with database search syntax, such as librarians, systematic reviewers or other information professionals
Standard mode vs expert mode at a glance
| Standard mode | Expert mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Search approach | Boolean keyword search and semantic (meaning based) search | Embase-style Boolean query syntax |
| Phrase searching | Yes, using quotation marks | Yes, using quotation marks, with truncation inside phrases |
| Proximity searching | Yes, using a proximity distance | Yes, with more control: NEAR and NEXT operators, adjustable distance, and phrase proximity |
| Truncation | Available, on its own | Available, and can be combined with other techniques |
| Combining search techniques | Each technique works on its own, and can be combined with Boolean operators and nested logic, but not with each other | Techniques can be freely combined, for example truncation inside a phrase, or proximity used with truncation and wildcards |
| Searchable fields | A small set of common fields, such as title, domain, and policy author | A wide range of fields, including AI generated document summaries, and exact, numeric, and date fields, such as publication year, citation count, and source type |
| Multiple fields per search | One field at a time | Multiple fields at once, such as title and snippet together |
Field searching considerations
Searching within “abstracts”
Policy documents don’t have abstracts. We sometimes pull descriptive text from webpages for the documents we collect in lieu of abstracts – these are referred to as “snippets”. Within Overton, around 8% of documents include a snippet.
To mitigate the lack of author supplied abstracts and the small number of available snippets on our documents, we introduced AI generated document summaries. If you are looking to search within a summary of policy documents, we recommend searching within our document summaries, as they are available for a much wider range of documents (around 90%).
Searching within the document summary field is only available in our expert mode.
Searching within titles
Titles of policy documents are automatically added to our database when we index new documents and may contain errors. Bear this in mind if you restrict your search strategy to titles only.