Finding things

Explore

Explore is the one place to find things. With nothing typed it shows what is recommended for you; type something and it shows the best matches – works, people and organizations in one list, best first; pick a kind or a filter with nothing typed and it lists that kind. Everything you set is in the address, so a result page is a link you can share.

Search covers titles, body text, author names, and tags. It tolerates typos – nueral finds neural – and ranks by relevance rather than recency.

Quote a phrase to require it exactly:

"spectral sequence"

Without quotes, those become two separate terms and you will get results containing either.

Filters

The filters sit beside the results (behind a Filters button on a phone):

• Show – everything, or only works, people, organizations, collections or categories.
• Type – lecture, seminar, problems, theory, and the rest. See Publications for what each covers.
• Full text – read here, at the source, or not available.
• Language – the language a work is written in, which is not the same as the language of the interface you are reading.
• Year, and the order: newest first, or top by votes.
• Category – from a category page, "Works in this category" opens Explore with the category applied.

Filters combine. Narrowing by category and language at once is usually more effective than a longer search query.

Browsing instead of searching

Search is for when you know what you want. When you do not, Explore with nothing typed shows recent and popular work, personalised once you follow things. Category pages describe a field – what it is related to, who works in it – and hand you to Explore for the lists.

Subscriptions

Follow a person, subscribe to an organization or a category, and their new work appears under Subscriptions – one stream, newest first. There is no approval step and no notification requirement – following is public in the sense that follower counts are visible, but it is not a mutual relationship you have to negotiate. Manage under Subscriptions lists everything you follow, with the way out; Followers and Connections are there too.

Some parts of a profile are visible only to mutual connections. See Your profile.

Your library

Bookmark anything worth returning to; bookmarks are private and collected in your library, which also keeps your reading history.

If you want to share a set of publications rather than keep it for yourself, that is a collection, not a bookmark – see Collections.

If your work is not being found

Almost always this is categories and tags. Search indexes your full text, but category and tag filters are how people browsing a field arrive at work they were not specifically looking for.

Beyond that: a descriptive title beats a clever one, the first paragraph is what shows in result lists, and a linked ORCID connects your existing published record to your profile.