[Old] Tips & Tricks

Hints to help you get the best out of your searches and results in Identify Online. You should consider:

• Cities. To search for more than one city, separate cities by commas (no spaces) and the search will work for any one of these. eg York,London,Exeter. The search will only work on a complete city name. Please be aware that city is not the same as region.
• Consortia records, States. Use a Search in Identify Online rather than a Standard Report, to find consortia members in individual CAN and US states.
• Cultural differences. Our organization and city names are based on the native language eg centre/center, behavioral/behavioural, organisation/organization, defence/defense, Milan/Milano, Prague/Praha, Copenhagen/Kobenhavn, Vienna/Wien, Belgrade/Beograd. ISO 8859 Latin 2 is the character set used for East European languages.
• Editorial policy. We remove unnecessary information from organization names, eg change ‘&’ to ‘and’, ‘company’ to ‘co’, ‘incorporated’ to ‘inc’, ‘limited’ to ‘ltd’, and we remove full stops, commas, brackets, etc. We do not abbreviate ‘department’ to ‘dept’. See the full Identify Database Editorial Policy for further details.
• Existing records. Searching by name with the most unique or significant keyword in the organization name in Identify Online will help narrow your results. Or find the URL for the organization on Google first and then search by URL. Try also searching for the parent record and then expand the hierarchy to look for subsidiaries.
• Libraries now have records of their own. Organizational records for libraries are mapped into both an administrative hierarchy as
  above and also into a hierarchy for the libraries themselves, wherever appropriate. For example, a university law library will be mapped administratively to the law department and will also be mapped to the main university library in the library hierarchy.
• Multiple choices. When selecting more than one choice in a search filter, eg country, type, hold down CTRL and click each one to select multiple choices. Two or more cities can be entered, separated by commas (no spaces) and the search will work for any one of them.
• Variation of Organization Names. Think about synonyms when searching in Identify Online to gain the most appropriate results eg medical center/hospital/clinic/health centre. Alternatively, searching for all Ringgold H2 tiers within a particular city should give all hospitals, rather than typing the word hospital in the name field.
• Search terms are combined using AND so if you use child and health the results will only find results using both of these words. Name will search on any name, keywords in a name, fragments of a name, and alternative names. Searches are not case sensitive. Results are sorted in alphabetical order.
• Each Standard Report in Identify Online can be reproduced as a Search. Do this to enable results to be exported into a spreadsheet.
• Truncation. Simple search terms are automatically right-truncated, so “medic” becomes “medic*”, and will find both “medicine” and “medical”. You don’t need to add the *.
• Tiers. Use Ringgold Tiers in Identify Online to narrow your results of organizations. For example, use tier A4 in a search to find doctorate-granting, research-heavy academic institutions. You can also search for more than one Tier by using a comma (no spaces) eg ‘A3,A4’. A complete list and description of Ringgold Tiers is here.
• Type differences and similarities. Review all Types used in the Identify Database to ensure you have captured everything relevant for your search. If you are looking for all hospitals, for example, be sure to select both hospital and academic/hospital. If you want to see ALL medical research institutes, select academic/medres AND other/medres. A complete list and description of Ringgold Types is here.
• URLs are retained for various domain levels in the Identify Database. Searching for rai.ox.ac.uk will provide more specific results than the wider domain of ox.ac.uk, for example.