How to Search the ISTC

You may perform a free-text search just by entering a search term into the search box and hitting “search”. Your search will return all the records that contain the given search term in any of their fields.


To get more precise search results, you can combine any number of search terms or even use logical (boolean) operators.


While your search terms could be upper or lower case (or any combination thereof), the logical operators must always be written in capitals. Truncation and wildcards can be used within and at the end of a search term: an asterisk (*) replaces an arbitrary number of characters, a question mark (?) replaces exactly one character. If you want to search for two or more words that appear next to each other in a specific order (phrase search), enclose your search term in quotation marks (“).


The search engine also supports regular expressions as search terms. The syntax of regular expressions might be a bit complex and difficult to learn, but once mastered, it enables you to formulate rather elaborate queries.


You may also search for words that are similar to your search term by adding a tilde (~). The similarity measure (Damerau-Levenshtei distance) defaults to 2. You may sepificy a similarity measure by adding it after the tilde (e.g. ethica~1).


In order to find records where your search term appears only in a certain field, add the field's name to the search term followed by a colon. Please note that there must be no blank before or after the colon. If your search term consists of multiple parts, enclose them by parentheses, e.g. title:(ethica nicomachum) or title:(ethica OR poetica). When searching for phrases, use quotation marks: title:“ethica ad nicomachum”. In the ISTC the following fields are available for searching:

For more elaborate search options see also the full documentation of the Apache Lucene Query Syntax.