BCS Search

To find information on the Department's pages, enter a word or two below

Some Tips on Searching

To get more specific search results, try some of the following:

Check spelling Example: colour/color   Use multiple words Example: flowering plant evolution   Use similar terms Example: gene allele   Use appropriate capitalisation Example: C 25A

Use quotation marks Example: "bonding in carbon polymers"   Use plus (+) or minus (-) Example: +DNA   Use wildcards Examples:  mycorrhiz*  "wh* are"  BL 2*

Most of this advice applies to the majority of Internet search engines and WWW searchable directories.

Check spelling

Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. If Sound-Alike Matching is turned on, the search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms e.g. colur, but it's always best to try to spell the search terms correctly. And, use all alternative spellings, e.g. colour and color, authors in different countries will use one or the other.

On this site, all course codes should have a letter C or the letters BL followed by a space and the three digit number. Thus, searching C14A should not find anything (or everything) about C 14A - Introductory Inorganic Chemistry.  

Use multiple words

Using multiple words will return more refined/restricted results than a single word. For example, typing flowering plant evolution will return more relevant results than just typing evolution or plant evolution. (However, less relevant results will be returned that don't contain all the search terms.)

Use similar terms

The more similar words you use in a search, either the more relevant your results will be since they include all the words or the more inclusive your results will be with each including at least one of the alternative/alternate terms.

Use appropriate capitalization

If you are looking for a word starting with a capital letter, type your search word that way. Lower-case words will match any case. For example, typing amoeba will return all documents containing the common name - amoeba, the generic name - Amoeba, and the all caps AMOEBA. Typing Amoeba, however, will instruct the search engine to look only for the capitalized generic name.

Use quotation marks

Using quotation marks identifies a phrase with words which must appear in order and adjacent to each other, e.g. "bonding in carbon polymers". Otherwise, the search results will include the words bonding, in, carbon, and the word polymers, but not necessarily in that order. The words may appear anywhere, and in any order, within the document.

Use plus (+) or minus (-)

A plus sign before a search term or phrase means that it must appear in each of the search results. A minus sign is used to exclude undesirable term(s). A web search of saccharum (the generic name of sugarcane) finds many references to sugar maple, Acer saccharum. Using +saccharum -acer solves this problem.

N.B. A phrase must be contained within quotation marks and no space should be left between the plus or minus sign and the search term/phrase.

Use wildcards

Wildcard searches can expand the number of matches for a particular request by, for example, allowing a search for a term with both a noun and adjectival forms. In this, and many other search engines, the * character is used as the wildcard character.

For instance, searching for mycorrhiz* will find the words mycorrhiza, mycorrhizae, mycorrhizal, mycorrhizas and any other word that starts with mycorrhiz (if there are any).

Searching for *her* will find the words here, whether, together, gathering, and many other words that contain her anywhere in the word.

Wildcards may be combined with the standard plus (+) and minus (-) modifiers, quotes for phrases, as well as the field search specifiers.
+wh* -se*ch will find all pages which have a word that starts with wh and which does not contain a word that starts with se and ends with ch.
"wh* are" will find the phrases where are, what are, why are, etc.