ENTREZ REFINEMENTS
Purpose: Some examples and definitions of refining Entrez searches.
big protein = searches for "big" and
"protein"
Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase, for example:
"big protein"= searches for "big protein" but note,
if this phrase is not found, then Entrez goes back and searches for
"big" and "protein".
Also if the phrase is specified slightly differently e.g.
"big blue protein", then the phrase
"big protein" will not be retrieved.
Click on Details to check what you really searched for!
Boolean operators are AND, OR, & NOT
e.g. big AND protein, (big AND (protein OR gene OR intron)) NOT RNA
Search fields can be used to limit the search to a category, for example:
lacZ [GENE] or Watson [AUTH]
relevent search fields include:
ACCN accession number
ALL all fields
AUTH author name
ORGN organism
GENE gene name
PROT protein name
FKEY biological features of the nucleotide sequence
JOUR journal name
VOL volume number of journal
PAGE first page number of the article
TITL words in the title or definition
KYWD keyword or special index term
ISS issue number of the journal
MOLWT molecular weight of protein in Daltons (use 6 digits e.g. 005000
[MOLWT] for 5kdal; can specify a range 005000:010000 [MOLWT] for 5-10
kdal.
PDAT date first appear in entrez format YYYY/MM/DD
MDAT date most recently modified YYYY/MM/DD
SLEN sequence length
UID unique identifier number
PACC primary accession number
So combining fields and operators as follows
Watson [AUTH] AND "deoxyribose nucleic acid" [TITL] or
Brca2 [GENE] AND human [ORGN]
Can also click on history to see past searches and combine these using
Boolean operators
#1 AND #2 or
(#1 AND #2) NOT #3
Disclaimer: The information provided on these
pages is not guaranteed to be accurate, I would appreciate if you would e-mail me with any errors
you find. Any views expressed are entirely my own and do not necessarily
reflect
those of my employers or other Columbia University
staff/students.
Last Updated May 04.