How to use Thesaurus Search Builder

Learn how you can build effective searches with Search Builder, powered by CABI Thesaurus

Tip: The Thesaurus Search Builder opens in the same tab as CABI Digital Library. To avoid losing unsaved search terms in the Advanced Search, run your search before opening the Thesaurus Search Builder.

Using Search Builder to create a search query

Follow these steps to build a targeted search query:

1

Identify relevant concepts by exploring the hierarchy or searching for concepts

Look for concepts related to your topic of interest (e.g. climate change and pest control)

2

View more details about a concept

Check whether this is the concept you are looking for

3

Build a search in My Concepts

Add multiple concepts to build a search query

4

Run your search on CABI Digital Library

You will find all results that have been indexed with your selected concepts

To help you navigate the Search Builder, here is a short description of the screen. There are three basic components in the display:

1. Hierarchy (left)

2. Graph (right)

3. My concepts (top right)

Explore the hierarchy to find concepts

Let's say we're broadly interested in research related to the climate. In the video below, we show how to explore the hierarchy to find concepts:

1. Expand the hierarchy of the top level grouping Climate Related, which displays the graph view on the right

2. The hierarchy (on the left) and graph view (on the right) display preferred terms—those we apply to records as tags

3. Selecting a concept in the graph view displays more information, including any synonyms (under the heading altLabel)

4. climate change has the synonym / non-preferred term / altLabel climatic change

Search for a concept

You can also use the search to find a concept:

1. Type climatic change in the search bar

2. Selecting the result moves you to the concept

View more details about a concept

Whether we navigated to a concept through the hierarchy or jumped to it through search, we can view more information about it and any of its connected concepts:

1. Select a concept in the graph view

2. A new window opens with more details about the concept. Depending on the concept, it can show:

   1. CABI's identifier for the concept

   2. Preferred Label

   3. Alternative Label

   4. Translations

   5. Related concepts (click to explore them)

   6. Narrower concepts (click to explore them)

   7. Terms it's frequently indexed with

   8. Broader concepts (click to explore them)

   9. Scheme it's in

   10. Exact matches with other controlled vocabularies

   11. Type of concept

   12. Indexing class: Descriptor (DE), Organism Descriptor (OD), Geographic Location (GL), Broad Term (UP), Identifier (ID), more information

Build a search in My Concepts

'My Concepts' is where we build our search:

1. Open My Concepts in the top right

2. In this example, we have just climate change stored. Let's say we want to find research to do with the impact of climate change on pest control.

3. Go back to the search box and start typing a search for pest control

4. Open the matching result in the graph view

5. Add it to 'My Concepts' by clicking the + sign next to it

6. You can remove concepts from either within 'My Concepts' or in the graph view

Add an additional concept and start a search on CABI Digital Library

Now we want to narrow our search by location:

1. Move to the top level grouping Geographical Entities

2. Drill down to for example Africa

3. Add that to 'My Concepts'

4. The search string updates to show that all the terms are connected with AND - requiring all the tags to be present on the returned records

5. From 'My Concepts' we launch our search on CABI Digital Library by clicking 'Run Search Query'

6. CABI Digital Library returns all records tagged with climate change, pest control and Africa

You can make a search more complex using other Boolean operators (OR, NOT).

How CABI Thesaurus powers Search Builder and helps to retrieve records on CABI Digital Library

At the end of each database record on CABI Digital Library, you see its Indexing Terms.

These 'tags' are applied by our indexers before loading to CABI Digital Library. We host records from diverse sources, and by tagging records using our own controlled vocabulary, we describe the content consistently, making it easier to retrieve.

In this example, the title and abstract only mentions the common name triticale, but the relevant Organism Descriptor Triticum x Secale has been added from the Thesaurus. As a result, this record can be retrieved alongside other records that mention Triticum x Secale explictly. General concepts like 'arid zones' and 'cultivars'—whether referred to as such or using different terminology—are added as Descriptors. And Geographical Locations are also drawn from the Thesaurus's preferred terms, so that the where of a record is also described consistently.

This indexing is one side of the coin, but the other is to enable users to discover our indexing terms and make use of them, to build precise searches that take advantage of this consistent approach to describing our content. The CABI Thesaurus Search Builder is designed to do just that.