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Searching the ASABE Technical Library
Site licenses are purchased by many libraries and allow full access to the documents that are available. Contact your library staff and request that they obtain a site license for your location. Without a site license, you have free access to the abstracts and the Endnote RIS reference download for a document .
Technical Library Search Engine Tips
Results are displayed in order of relevance. Relevance may be determined by how close one keyword is to another in the text.
Results are limited to 1000 listings. If you reach 1000, please change your query to see everything relevant to your search. Searches are not case-sensitive. The search will not fix spelling errors for you, so "ageing" and "aging" are not considered equal. Words with other spelling variations will be handled differently like "flavor" and "flavour", so choose the "with at least one of the words" option and search for both words. You may want to use wildcards for non-English characters. Also, see the Exceptions and Notes section near the end of this page.
At the top of the results, the search query is displayed. Review it and make sure it reflects your expectations. Generally, start with two or three keywords or document number and refine your search.
Members may sign up for email notifications when new content of interest becomes available.
The list of all publications in the Technical Library may help you with your search by providing example information and a list of publications in each category below. You can browse all of the documents from that list.
The "Search In" option can restrict the search to specific document types or choose All Categories for everything.
- All Categories
- Conference Proceedings
- Design Topics
- Journals - Transactions, Applied, JASH, Biological Engineering, Journal of the ASABE
- Resource magazine
- Standards
- Special Collections
- Technical Books
- Technical Meetings - AIM annual meeting
Then choose one of the options below. Note that the wildcard, search techniques, and character restrictions are different for option 1 versus option 2.
Option 1 - Find words anywhere
Gives you three search choices. Enter your keywords in ONE of the three input boxes. The wildcard character is the asterisk (*). A query for "fly*" finds "flying", "flyway" and other words that begin with "fly". With two asterisks together, a query for "fly**" finds variations of a stem word like "flying", "flown", and "flew".
For option 1, you may obtain better results by not using punctuation such as periods, commas, dashes, colons, semicolons, extra spaces, question marks, exclamation marks, percent symbols, or single quotes. Do not use a single letter except in the "with the exact word or phrase" query (example: "zea mays L" has a single letter in it). These characters may be ignored, have zero results, or cause an error.
- with all of the words - example: "irrigation scheduling corn" searches for “irrigation NEAR scheduling NEAR corn".NEAR requires the terms to be within a certain number of words of each other in either direction.Displays this query at the top of the results:"Documents 1 to 10 of 539 matching the query "irrigation near scheduling near corn"
- with the exact word or phrase - example: "irrigation scheduling corn" searches for exactly this phrase "irrigation scheduling corn". Displays the following at the top of the results: Documents 1 to 1 of 1 matching the query "irrigation scheduling corn"
A search for "concen" with the double quotes included does not return any results because of the exact match forced by the quotes. However, search for "concen" without the double quotes finds variations of the word. A search for "CROPGRO–SOYBEAN" will find itself and "CROPGRO-SOYBEAN" because the special characters represent a dash in a Word document.
- with at least one of the words - example: "irrigation scheduling corn" searches for “irrigation OR scheduling OR corn”
Or, if you put keywords in more than one of the inputs, each query will be ANDed together. So, if "soybean constraint" is in the first input, "irrigation scheduling" is in the second input, and "neural annealing" is in the third input, the query is evaluated from left to right such that any document matching the "annealing" keyword is listed and any document meeting all of the other previous criteria ANDed together is listed. Example:
Documents 1 to 10 of 86 matching the query "soybean near constraint AND irrigation scheduling AND neural or annealing".
Option 2 - Select one or more of the other boxes
Document number/DOI, Author(s), Keyword list (keywords provided by author), Title. One query input for “with the exact word or phrase” appears. The wildcard does not work with the "with all of the words" option.
You may use punctuation such as periods, commas, dashes, extra spaces, question marks, exclamation marks, or single quotes. For these searches, you may sometimes use the wildcard percent symbol (%) inside the keywords. A search for "air curtain" will not find "air-curtain", so to find both variations use "air%curtain" or do two searches.
Some text will have special characters in it. For example, "CROPGRO–SOYBEAN" has three special characters that represent the dash or hyphen between the two words and normally looks like "CROPGRO-SOYBEAN". However, a search using those two phrases will give different results. A title search of "CROPGRO%SOYBEAN" will find both since it has the wildcard in it. When trying to find a dash or hyphen in words, it may be best to use the percent symbol wildcard.
If words are not exactly the same and in the same order, they will not match except for partial matches at the beginning and end of the word or phrase The wildcard is added to the beginning and end of the search query. So, an author search for "sage" searches the authors text and finds the author "Sager" and finds an author with a "BSAgE" after their name. A search for "C. Sage" finds the author "J. C. Sager" because both ends of the search phrase are automatically wildcarded.
For document numbers, search by the paper number 141897065 or DOI number like 10.13031/aim.20141897065. You can also search for a standard using queries like "D309.1". To find ASABE paper number 03-1168, put "031168" in the query.
For author searches, the best query to find most variations of "Joel O. Paz" would be "J%O%Paz" which would find "J. O. Paz", "Joel O. Paz", "Joel O Paz", and "J O Paz". A search for "%ford" returns all documents with authors whose name ends with "ford". The search "%pote%wax" returns papers authored by Pote and Wax, in that order. However, the search "wax%pote" returns no results due to the order of the authors. A search for "el%awady" will find "el-awady", "el awady", and "elawady".
For title searches, if you do not know the exact title or partial title, you may get better results using the "Find words anywhere" option and putting the title in the "with all of the words" input. That will find all of the words close to each other somewhere in the document. So a title search for "agricultural impacts of flooding" has no results, but the same search using the "Find words anywhere" option has over 200 results.
Query restrictions
Entering Boolean operators like NEAR, OR, or AND in the query box will result in an error. The boolean operator used depends on which query box you use. See notes above.
DOI Name
The DOI name or number is a unique string assigned to documents. DOI names were assigned to ASABE documents about the year 2013, so many DOI names will have "2013" in them. ASABE DOI names begin with "10.13031/". The remainder of the name often has a four digit year, meeting or conference abbreviation like "AIM", and the paper number. For example, for the AIM 2014 meeting, a DOI would be similar to 10.13031/aim.20141897065. However, for meetings before 2013, the DOI names were similar to 10.13031/2013.41699. DOI numbers may not be included in the PDF files or print copies of many documents. For more on DOI or to search by DOI, go to www.doi.org.
Exceptions and Notes
- Copying words from other sources including Microsoft Word and pasting them into queries may give poor results due to extra spaces and special characters.
- Transactions goes back to the first volume in 1958. However, only the PDF version is available (no HTML) until volume 44 in 2001 and author provided keywords are not listed until volume 34 in 1991.
- Not all papers from meetings and conferences are in the library. Authors may not have submitted their paper electronically to ASABE.
- Due to typographical errors and changes over time in how we formatted author's names and other changes, wildcards need to be used to get the best results.
- Many of the older documents are scanned images but have been made searchable by OCR.
- The search will not fix spelling errors for you, so "ageing" and "aging" are not considered equal.
- Words with other spelling variations (American vs British) will be handled differently like "flavor" and "flavour", so choose the "with at least one of the words" option and search for both words.
- Common words such as a, an, and, the, of, etc. are ignored in most searches except for exact searches.
- Extra spaces at the beginning or end of the query string are trimmed off.
- The @ symbol and year at the end of the citation represent the year published.
- Non-English characters or special characters like copyright and trademark symbols may cause poor search results. Use wildcards for them.
Google Search Tips
You can find many of the ASABE articles referenced in Google searches. If you have a member login or your location has a site license, as many libraries and some businesses have, you will be able to access the full text of documents. Without a member login or site license, you will not be able to access the full text of documents.
To search our Technical Library using Google, use the "site" tag as shown below. Try this example query in Google search:
site:elibrary.asabe.org simulated annealing
This query finds only documents in the Technical Library having the keywords "simulated annealing". Google searches may not display the links for the abstract, PDF download, or export to Endnote like the ASABE search engine.
The Google Advanced Search makes it easy to limit your search to ASABE and use a number of other search enhancements. On the advanced search web page in the "site or domain" input, put "elibrary.asabe.org".
Google Scholar provides another way to search and it includes our material. Add your keywords to the input box.
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