Concept Search = Relevant Results

• eLibrary uses Autonomy search technology, which is concept, not keyword based.
  (You can treat it as if it was Google, but you'll get better results, and save yourself a lot of time sorting through results if you give it more information so it can return the most relevant results.)

• The default (and recommended) sort order is relevance. As with many search engines, the number of overall results may be high, but most users are able to find what they need in the top 25. If you do not find what you are looking for, try to search with more complete phrases or added information.
• Relevance is based on Autonomy's interpretation of how well the document matches the concepts in your search. It is using all of the information it has about a paper to make that determination (Title, abstract, and full text when available). If you give it sufficient information in your search request, customers report excellent results.
• While the default order of search results is by relevance, you can choose to sort your results by paper number or year (most recent year first) if that better suits your research needs. The relevance will still be shown in your results for reference.
• If you enter only a couple of keywords, you'll see that a large number of documents have the same relevance. That's because all the search engine could do was identify documents that include those words – it didn't have enough information to determine which were most relevant to what you are really looking for. Give it more information about what you want to know and it will be able to put the "best" matches first.
  
  *Reminder: You can combine fielded searches such as year and author with information in the search box.

Fielded Searches

• To get an exact match on the title try putting it in quotation marks (e.g., "corrosion rate prediction"). If you aren't certain you have the words exactly right or in the right order, enter your search without quotes and you will get variations that may help you locate the right paper.
• Use commas to separate multiple items in a field.
  (Exception: If your search term is in quotes to get an exact match, you will not be able to input multiple entries in that field in the same search. Multiple searches will be required.)
• Year search will return you papers for only the years you specify. You can enter single years, ranges (2000-2005), or before/after (<1990, >2000).
  
• Author and Company searches are special cases and may take longer to execute. When you input an author name, the search engine can only look for authors with that name and assume all are similarly relevant to your query. As a result of this, all papers by authors with that name are displayed in what may appear to be random order.
  • Remember that an author might be listed in a variety of ways (e.g., Ramey, H.J.; Ramey Jr., H.J., H.J. Ramey Jr.; Hank Ramey; Ramey, Jr., Harold). If the author has an unusual last name, just input the last name. For someone with a common last name, you may have to try multiple searches or go through a longer list of papers.
  • To search for an author formatted last name first, you need to put the entry in quotes (e.g., "Smith, G.E.", "Jones, Carl") If you don't enclose your request in quotes, the search engine would see the request as two separate terms -- Smith and G.E., which would get more results than you intended, but would still return the papers by that author.
  • For older papers, the word "and" is likely to be spelled out rather than as "&" (e.g., "Texas A and M", Arco R and D). You may need to try your search both ways.
  • The company (author's employer) is not always available. The search engine will return results based on the documents that have information in that field. Company names may be listed many different ways, so a single search may not get you all documents by authors who work for that company. A search on Halliburton or Schlumberger would likely get you all of their companies that include Halliburton or Schlumberger in the name. But IFP might be listed as IFP, Institute Français du Pétrole, Institute Francais du Petrole, and possibly others. Multiple searches might be required to produce a company bibliography.
    

• Too many results? Try limiting your search by selecting only recent years (e.g., >2003) if you are looking for recent technology.
• Looking for a paper from a particular meeting? Enter either the full name, or a portion of the name where the paper was presented.
• Too many items with the same relevance? Enter additional information in the search box to describe what you really want to know.

Note: if you enter both a meeting and select a journal from the drop down menu, you will not get any search results

Helpful Hints:

• More words=better results. Search by relevence works best with three or more words.
• Search can be case sensitive! If you enter title case such as World Oil Fields Nigeria the search will assume that the title case indicates a proper name or title and will return only results that contain " World Oil Fields Nigeria". When in doubt, it is best to always use lower case, for example: "world oil fields nigeria".
• Don't focus on the number of results returned. As you give the search engine more information, it is likely to return more results, but the additions will be less relevant. The default (and recommended) sort order is relevance. So don't worry about the total number of results — focus instead on how well the top 25 results reflect your information needs. If you find what you need in the top 25, who cares how many results were in the list?
• If you know the paper number – use that field only. This is one case where you can give the search engine too much information.
• How to search by author depends on what you want to know. To find papers written by a specific author, search in the author field. To find both papers written by the author and papers that reference materials by the author, put the author's name in the search box.

After you enter your search terms and click the Search button, you will first see an area of search results with a blank space to the left. A few seconds later, the left column will appear.

Search categorization is displayed to the left. This categorization is only ever for the top 500 results (based on relevance of documents to your search criteria).

The first area of categorization is by paper type . The number in parenthesis after the type indicates the number of documents of that type included in the top 500 search results. This gives you a quick method to narrow your focus to peer reviewed papers or presentations.

The second area of categorization is by company. This information does not exist for all documents. Results are based on those for which the information is available. This allows you to quickly identify what organizations have been active in the area of your search. Note: This is based on how the author's company is listed in the metadata for each document. So Institut Français du Petrole and Institut Francais du Petrole (IFP) are seen as two different organizations. The results are displayed in order, with only the top 10 shown. You can click the More... link to see the rest of the list. Be forewarned that it will be very long.

The third area of categorization is by author. The number in parenthesis indicates the number of documents in the top 500 authored or co-authored by an individual. This will allow you to identify who has written a lot on your topic of interest. Note: This is based on how the author's name was shown on the document. So H.J. Ramey, Harold Ramey, and Hank Ramey, Jr. would show up as 3 different people. In the example at right you can see H.A. Nasr-El-Din and Hisham A. Nasr-El-Din are both listed. The results are displayed in order, with only the top 10 shown. You can click the More... link to see the rest of the list. Be forewarned that it will be very long.

What happens if I click on an item in the categorization?

If you click on a paper type, author, or company, your original search is re-executed with the additional constraint of that society, author, or company. The categorization at left will remain unchanged, but the search reults set will change.

Why is my number of search results different from the number in the categorization?

The categorization is limited to the top 500 results. If you had more than 500 total results in your original search (909 in the example above), re-executing the search is looking for that paper type, author or company across your entire result set, so the number found may be larger than what was shown for the top 500.

Why doesn't the categorization change when I click on an item in the categorization?

We kept the categorization constant so that you could easily click through a series of authors or companies to see what they were writing about.

1. Provide as much information as possible (more detail = better results)

For example, "reservoir modeling" will return a very large number of results. "Reservoir modeling in carbonates" will provide a more focused group of responses. "Reservoir modeling in carbonates in West Texas" gives an even more focused group of results that may be able to help you locate the information you need quickly. Don't be afraid to use industry terminology. Tell it what you really want to know.

2. Numbers, punctuation and special characters may have unintended effects, so avoid them as much as possible

Do not use a question mark at the end of your query. The search engine treats it as a wild card character at the end of the last word, which may affect its understanding of your request. If a term is or may be hyphenated (e.g., highly-fractured, multi-phase, one-trip), you may want to try your search both with and without the hyphen, as responses may differ, especially when use of the hyphen depends on sentence structure.

3. Consider spelling differences and synonyms where appropriate

The search engine automatically "stems" words down to their root word and considers all words with the same root to be a match (e.g., expand, expanding, expanded, expandable). But it does not automatically account for the differences in U.S. and British spelling of certain words (e.g., favor and favour). Since the search engine is looking through documents from around the world, if a word with alternate spellings is important to your query, you may want to input both as part of your request.

You must be logged in to use the Save this Search feature. When you click on the Save this Search button, a box will appear to provide a name for this saved search. The name can include letters and numbers only - no special characters. If you already have a search with that name, you will be notified and asked to provide a different name.

When you select Go the search criteria will be saved. This does NOT save your search results - only the search request from which you got those results. Saving the search would allow you to perform the same search in a few weeks or months to see what's new.

To use your saved search in the future, login to the website and go to the My Saved Searches area of the home page. You can click on the name of your saved search to run it again.

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When your transaction is complete, a receipt page will be displayed. From that page you can print a copy of your receipt (for your records or expense reimbursement) and you can go directly to a page for downloading the documents you purchased. In case you are unable to download your purchases immediately, or encounter difficulties, an email with information for printing a receipt and downloading documents will be sent to the email address you provided. You will have 6 calendar days to download your purchased documents.

You will have 6 calendar days from the date of purchase to download your documents.

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The search engine is trying to find the documents that are most relevant to your search and is organizing results according to relevance. When your search includes only one or two words (i.e., an author's name) it doesn't have much information to go on, so the rationale for the order in which they are displayed may not be obvious. When it has no other basis for organizing items (i.e., all have the same relevance), it is defaulting to an internal control number that reflects the order in which documents were migrated from the old eLibrary and will not necessarily reflect either date or paper number.

If you prefer to sort your results by paper number or year, you can choose one of those options using the drop down on your search results. Year will always begin with the most current year. Paper number will start with the largest paper number.

The search engine is trying to be helpful in case you didn't know the name or title exactly, and also returning "close" matches. If you want an exact match only, enclose your request in quotation marks (e.g., "corrosion rate prediction "). But if you're searching for an author, remember that the author's name may have been entered several different ways, so quotation marks will decrease the liklihood of finding all of that author's papers.

Execute your favorite search and sort by paper number (or date). Then use our new Save This Search feature (you must be logged in). Give the search a name you will remember. When you come back to SPE.org and log in, go to the My Saved Searches area at the bottom of the home page. Click on the name of your search. The search will be run for you, with the most recent paper numbers (or dates) at the top, so you can easily identify what's new since the last time you conducted your search.

You have visited them on a previous search. Information about previously visited links is held in your browser's history files. So even though you have not visited the link during this particular browser session, if the information about a prior visit remains in your browser's history, the link will show up as visited. To reduce this, you can shorten the amount of history retained by your browser. For Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options. On the General Tab, there is a place to specify the number of days to retain history and a button to clear the history.

SPE puts a cookie on your computer with the items in your cart. This cookie clears when you complete the transaction, or it expires in 6 days. We did this to assist users who experience connectivity issues mid-transaction. The items in the cart would be from an incomplete transaction the last time you visited SPE. If you no longer want these documents, use the Remove link next to those items on the View Cart page.

Not necessarily. If you are an SPE member and want to receive the member discount, or if you have access to a corporate or individual subscription, you will need to log in. If you want to take advantage of the new feature for saving a search, you will need to be logged in. But non-members who visit infrequently and just want to purchase papers with a credit card will be able to complete a transaction without logging in.

The size of pdf documents in the eLibrary varies widely. While some are small, as authors take advantage of improving technology to include more color graphics, figures, and photos in their papers, file size is generally increasing. While there are exceptions, most companies limit email attachments to a size of 1MB or even less. Many papers in the eLibrary exceed this file size, so emailing papers from the eLibrary is not practical. Pdf is a pretty efficient file format, such that "zipping" them makes little difference in the file size (often 5% or less reduction in file size). So "zipping" will not reduce the file size enough to make email delivery practical. For now, SPE does not have a mechanism that would allow you to zip numerous papers into a single document before download (not to reduce size, just to reduce the number of downloads). We know that there is customer interest in this option and we will continue to investigate whether this is something that could potentially be offered in the future. But it is not clear whether this will be feasible.

First, check your spam filter to make certain that the email wasn't caught accidentally. While SPE has carefully constructed the email to avoid triggering spam filters, unexpected results are always possible. If you have the option, you may want to "whitelist" email from service@spe.org to be certain that your email gets to you. If you have checked your spam filter and still did not receive the email, contact SPE Customer Service at service@spe.org or 1.972.952.9393. Provide them with information that will help them identify your specific transaction, such as the date, your name and email, and any other information that might be helpful.

While many of the pdfs in the eLibrary can be viewed with Acrobat Reader v. 5, beginning with papers published after 1 May 2005, v. 6 or higher of Acrobat Reader is required. As technology has improved, authors have taken advantage to provide more color graphics and photos in their papers. Many of these will not display properly with older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Upgrade your Reader