Online research in philosophy Entries: 207,362  New this week: 139  General search   Category finder  advanced search | help | use + and * as usual. Type words to match in category names

There are two kinds of search you can perform on PhilPapers:

Basic mode

In basic mode, which is always used except from the advanced search page, the PhilPapers search engine tries to guess if you are searching for a person's work or using keywords.

• If your query looks like an author's name, you will be presented with two sets of results: works by authors with matching names, and works not by authors with matching names, but which match your query treated as keywords. Most fields publicly visible on PhilPapers are searched to generate the second set of results.
• If your query does not look like someone's name, you will be shown the entries which match it either in the authors field or in another field.

A keyword-based search returns results matching any of the keywords provided, ranked by relevance. Relevance is computed as a function of the number of matching keywords and their individual frequencies in the database as a whole as well as matching entries. Frequency of occurrence in the database is not considered when using special characters (below).

Special characters:

• Use a star (*) to match anything at the end of a word, e.g. "dual*" will match both "dualism" and "dualist". A star can only be used at the end of a word.
• Use the plus sign (+) immediately before a word to indicate that it is mandatory (no space between + and the word).
• Use double quotation marks (") to indicate a literal string as opposed to separate keywords.

Our search engine applies a number of heuristics to help you find what you're looking for. For example, a search query of the form "Smith consciousness" will assign a very high relevance to articles by Smith containing the word "consciousness" in their titles. You can use this feature to quickly lookup a specific article.

Advanced mode

The advanced mode is explained on the advanced search page. The main difference with basic search is that you can specify how relevant your search terms are.

Note

Short (< 4 characters) and / or common words are ignored by the search engine.

You cannot use "and" or "or" as logical operators. However "+" (explained above) can be used instead of "and".