Simple search
If you have used Google or other internet search engines, the CORDIS simple search will be a breeze. For most people the Search and go approach will be the fastest and easiest way to find information about European research, whether it be a web page with a news story, a document such as a fact sheet, or formal documents like white papers or EU Directives, not to mention any of the different EU-funded research project-related data
Search and go
Enter one or more search terms (words) and click on the 
button. You then get a page of matching results with summaries and source information to help find what you’re looking for. Scan through the results page by page or Get better results by refining them by ‘subject’, ‘document type’, ‘programme’, ‘country’ or ‘source’.
For example:
This example means you are looking at the first 10 results out of a total of 910 for the search term 'FET'. You can click on the remaining blue hyperlinked pages for more results.
Refine to get better results
If you get no results or poor results, perhaps check your spelling, try other words or combinations (see Some search tricks), and try adding a date or something less generic. You could also try refining your current results list.
For example:
Here, you can click on the blue link and show the items matching your original search term but under the refined themes. So in this example, if you want FET-related items in 'Medecine, Health' you reduce the search to 62 results - much easier to drill down to the data, document or web page you want.
After you have narrowed your search to a smaller number of scannable results, it is also a good time to use the Similar items function. If you still can’t find exactly what you had in mind, try our Advanced search or Maps and locators options.
Some search tricks
There are some tricks you can use to improve your chances of getting a closer match to your search words. It comes down to the way computers process data and how you ask them (Boolean logic). And no, we don’t mean saying ‘please’.
It is how you phrase the search (terms). You can also add quotation marks around a phrase, such as “information technology”, and the computer will look for the whole phrase with the words as written. Without these marks, the system searches for the two words in any order and not necessarily next to each other so you get lots of useless ‘matches’. Using some special words, such as AND, OR, NOT and NEAR (Boolean operators), you can combine words and phrases which tell the computer your preferences. Check out the BBC’s Boolean operators’ tutorial for more info, or you can just let the CORDIS Advanced search do the complex stuff for you.
Last updated on: 2012-06-07
