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If none of the pages linked here have the information you need, the best place to ask is at the Help Desk. If you don't get a response there, feel free to post on the Moderator noticeboard.

This page documents how to search the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). There are two sides of ISFDB: the database and the wiki.

Searching the database

Please note that the database search forms do not search the ISFDB wiki. When entering search terms, please be careful to spell them correctly. If the spelling can be done multiple ways, you will need to search for each variation in spelling as the ISFDB search does not use fuzzy matching.

Basic searches

Basic searches can be completed by using the "Search the database" field at the top of the left menu column in the database view of ISFDB, which contains the following:

• A text field for entering search terms.
• A drop-down menu from which you select the type of record you wish to search. The drop-down defaults to "Name".
• A Go button that executes the search. Alternatively, pressing Enter while in the text field will also execute the search.
• A link to the Advanced Search page where you can perform more specific searches. You must be logged in to your ISFDB account to access Advanced Search.
• A link to "Search Help", which brings you to this page.

Basic searches generally use "contains", but there is an exception: "title" and "fiction title" searches are limited to complete words for performance reasons; use Advanced Search to search for a substring (e.g., "kenstein" in "Frankenstein") in a title. Please note that Basic searches also search transliterated forms of author, title, series, and publication series names while Advanced searches do not.

Advanced searches

The Advanced Search page contains the following three sections:

Custom Searches of Individual Record Types

This section is a list of links to Web pages that let users search the primary ISFDB records:

• Authors
• Titles
• Series
• Publications
• Publishers
• Publication series
• Award types
• Award categories
• Awards

All record-specific search pages allow the user to select up to ten search terms which can be joined using "AND" or "OR". Using only "AND" will display all records of the selected type that contain all of the entered terms. Using only "OR" will display all records of the selected type that contain any of the entered terms. Note that some types of Advanced Searches further restrict the functionality with the restrictions listed under "Selection Criteria" at the top of each Advanced Search page. For example, Advanced Title Search states "When specifying multiple authors and/or multiple tags, OR is supported but AND is not".

Please note that Advanced searches do not search transliterated forms of author, title, series, and publication series names.

For more technical details on how "AND" and "OR" work, please see this article and this article on Wikipedia.

For each term the user can specify one of the following matching criteria:

• "is exactly"
• "is not exactly"
• "contains"
• "does not contain"
• "starts with"
• "ends with"

Selecting certain search criteria in the left column restricts the choices in the right column to a drop-down list. For example, selecting "Juvenile" or "Non-Genre" in the left column of the Advanced Title Search results in the right column values being restricted to "Yes" and "No".

Other Searches

This section is a list of links to Web pages that let users perform specialized searches.

• Publication Search by External Identifier - Takes the name of an external identifier type and an ID and looks for all publications that share that ID.
• Notes Search - Lets the user search the Note fields of all ISFDB records for an arbitrary value at the same time. It also searches the Synopsis field of Title records.
• Web Page Search - Lets the user search the Web Page fields of all ISFDB records for an arbitrary value.
• User Search - Takes the exact name of one ISFDB user and looks for that user's name in the database. If found, it displays the user's moderator flag ("yes" or "no") and the user's last activity date. The latter is the last date when the user edited the database, edited the ISFDB Wiki or verified a publication.

Search ISFDB Using Google

Lets the user select a record type (author, title, series, etc) and search its records for an arbitrary value using Google. The main advantage of this way of searching is that Google supports approximate searches. The main disadvantage is that Google's data can be up to a few weeks out of date.

Searching the wiki

The wiki can be searched from any page on the wiki side of ISFDB using the search field at the top right of each page. As you enter terms, the wiki software will show you any pages that match what has been entered so far. At the bottom of the list of potential matches is an option to search for any pages containing the entered search term. If you press Enter or click the magnifying glass icon after entering a term, the wiki will either load the page (if you entered the exact name of a page) or show a list of results for page titles containing the search term. Please note that the wiki search form does not search the ISFDB database.

At the top of the results page is a box containing links for "Content pages", "Multimedia", "Everything", and "Advanced":

• "Content pages" displays search results in what is called the "wiki mainspace", followed by additional results not in the wiki mainspace. The wiki mainspace results are pages that do not have a prefix (one or more words followed by a colon, e.g., Help:Contents). As the ISFDB wiki doesn't have much content in the wiki mainspace, the results displayed may not be as helpful.
• "Multimedia" displays image files that have the search term either in the title or somewhere on the wiki page for that image. This can be useful if searching for something that might appear in the description of an uploaded cover or author image.
• "Everything" searches everywhere on the wiki, including mainspace, files/images, help, and so on.
• "Advanced" allows you to select specific namespaces to search. This is useful to narrow a search to a specific location on the ISFDB wiki. If you wish to save your selection of namespaces (making it your default when you perform wiki searches), check the box labeled "Remember selection for future searches".