There are two ways of searching on Kluwer Law Online:
- Quick search, which shows a search field directly in the menu bar at the top of your screen;
- Advanced search, which is a special screen that can be accessed through the button 'Advanced Search' in the menu bar.
Searches on Kluwer Law Online are performed irrespective of your access to any given title. This means that a hit list resulting from your query may contain links to documents that you do not have full-text access to. You will be able to access the information about that document, but not the actual document.
Creating more exact search queries
Both the Quick and the Advanced Search screens allow you to create a more exact search query through the use of wildcards and operators.
The following wildcards and operators can be used: Term Function How to Use Example AND Finds documents containing both terms Separate the words with a space, or separate with "and" tax and reform " " Finds terms in an exact sequence Use quotation marks around the sequence "tax reform" OR Finds documents containing one or both of the terms Separate terms with "or" tax or reform NOT Finds documents containing one term but excluding the other Separate terms with "not" tax not reform * a placeholder for an unspecified number of letters in the search term Type the search term with an asterisk symbol (*) in the place where the variations are allowed (usually at the end) arbitr* returns arbitrator, arbitration, arbitrage, etc ? a placeholder for one unspecified letter Replace letter with the ? symbol wom?n returns woman, women w/n Finds terms that are within a certain number of words (n) of each other Separate words with a "w" and a slash mark (/) and the number of words which can occur between the search terms smoke w/5 tobacco finds "smoke" and "tobacco" within 5 words of each other
Capitals, accents and diacritic marks
Searching is case-insensitive, i.e. it does not distinguish between capitals and lower case letters. Searching for Arbitration will also find arbitration.
The search engine does not distinguish between letters with accents and letters without accents. Searching for a word containing the letter "e" will also locate words containing "é", "è", "ĕ", "E", "É", "Ê", or "Ë".
The Quick Search is a short-cut to the simple and most frequently used searches. These always search the entire Kluwer Law Online database.
The Quick Search options are: Full text searches the full text of all documents to find the word or phrase specified; Title searches the titles of all documents to find the word or phrase specified; Author searches the author names of all documents to find the word or phrase specified. Simply enter your term(s) in the search field, select the required option from the drop-down list, and hit 'Search'. A hitlist will appear containing an overview of all documents that match your criteria.
Advanced search
The Advanced Search screen enables you to create more specific queries with additional search fields and by combining fields.
The following search fields are available: Full text searches the full text of all documents to find the word or phrase specified; Title searches the titles of all documents to find the word or phrase specified; Author searches the author names of all documents to find the word or phrase specified; Publication Date searches for documents with the desired publication date (month and year; year; or date range). The default search will look for your word or phrase in all documents.
At the bottom of the advanced search screen you can change this to search through journals only, Manuals only and documents from specific publications.
The hit list
The hit list that results from your search is a table with information about the relevant documents and links to each document's Information and full text. The columns in the hit list table can be sorted according to your preference. By default, your results are sorted according to Relevancy. To change, click on the down arrow or the up arrow at the top of the appropriate column on the search results page.
Each document is followed by a button 'Document' and a button 'Info'. The button 'Document' will open the PDF file of the document in a new window. If you are not already logged-in to Kluwer Law Online, you will be prompted for your log-in details. Please note that the document will only be available to you if your subscription to Kluwer Law Online includes that publication.
The button 'Info' will bring up a new window that shows the bibliographical information about the document. This information is freely available without a subscription.
At the top of the screen you can choose to refine your search or perform a new search. The button 'refine search' takes you back to the advanced search screen with the same search terms & values that you entered previously, so that you can refine your search. The button 'new search' calls up a blank Advanced Search screen.
You can fill out any of the fields at the same time to create even more specific searches.
Highlights in the pdf
You can open a pdf from the hitlist by clicking on the title of the pdf in the Title column. Once you have entered the pdf you can jump from highlight to highlight by clicking on the page with the arrow on top of the page.
