Literature Search

ivySCI comes with built-in ivy academic search, which allows you to search for local literature, notes, and English literature. You can also add other custom search engines, including Chinese search engines.

Global Search

Global search can be activated by clicking the search button on the navigation bar or by using the shortcut CTRL (CMD on Mac) + K. It can be used on any interface.

With global search, you can search for your local literature and notes. The system intelligently recognizes the source of the search term.

Even with just a few characters, the system can help you identify them from journals, tags, authors, and titles. Even if we can't remember a long word, we can quickly get the spelling of the word, helping us find literature or notes faster.

Intelligent search also supports searching with multiple tags combined, making it more convenient and efficient to find literature.

ivy Academic

Search Result

ivy Academic is a simple yet powerful literature search engine that provides information on over 200 million Chinese and English literature. Compared to traditional search engines, ivy Academic offers the following advantages:

  1. High search efficiency, with results returned in about 200ms when searching among 200 million literature.
  2. ivy Academic supports keyword and DOI (including URL queries).
  3. ivy Academic provides translations for titles and abstracts of all English literature.
  4. After searching, literature can be directly added to projects or obtained in the software through our provided solutions.

Areas for improvement:

  1. Our English data source is extensive, but due to the closure of Chinese data sources, our collection of Chinese literature is relatively limited.
  2. We do not support complex syntax definitions.

Custom Search Engines

Customized Search

In the literature import section, we have set up custom search engines and also included common search engines, including:

  • Baidu Scholar
  • Google Scholar
  • Bing Academic
  • CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure)
  • Wanfang Data
  • China National Center for Science and Technology Evaluation
  • ScienceRedirect
  • SemanticScholar
  • PubMed

While using the search engines, users can select their preferred search engine from the dropdown list and enter common keywords in the search box. The software will open the search interface accordingly.

After reaching the article page through a search engine, you can directly click to download the PDF or open the PDF on the official website. Regardless of the method you choose, you can import the PDF directly into the current project.

If you are unable to download due to a paywall, you can copy the DOI and then click on the Import Literature on the ivySCI homepage to import it using the DOI. Importing via DOI supports methods such as ResearchGate or SciHub (requires manual configuration).

Customizing Academic Search Engines

At the bottom of the search engine list, there is a settings button. Clicking on it allows you to sort the existing search engines and add other engines not listed.

Customize

Sorting Method

Drag the icon in the red box in the screenshot above up or down to sort the search engines. You can place your frequently used engines at the top.

Adding New Engines

On the last line of the settings window that pops up, you can enter the name and address of the search engine and click to add a new search engine.

Note that in the address, you need to replace the keyword. Follow the steps below (refer to the example or consult an expert):

  1. Open the search engine you want to add in your browser, such as https://xueshu.baidu.com/.
  2. Enter any keyword, for example, "paper."
  3. In the browser's address bar, find the variable corresponding to the "paper" keyword, such as wd=paper. Select and copy it.
  4. Connect the search engine's domain and the query keyword with a question mark, such as https://xueshu.baidu.com?wd=paper (note that there is an English question mark "?" before "wd," Chinese characters cannot be used).
  5. Replace "paper" with , such as https://xueshu.baidu.com?wd=.

Although there are multiple steps, the basic principle is to replace the search engine's query keyword with . This way, the system will use this address to search for the keyword every time.

Other Questions

  1. Does it support full-text search?

ivySCI does not support full-text search. Full-text search consumes a lot of resources but brings limited value.

ivySCI supports searching for key information such as article titles, abstracts, tags, and keywords. If the content you want to search for is not within these categories but only appears in the full text, it means that the value of that keyword in the full text is limited.

To improve search efficiency, we recommend taking good notes on cards. We index the content of card notes, so by searching the notes, you can find concepts that may not appear in titles and abstracts.