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Customer Support

For all queries or comments regarding Linguistics Abstracts Online, please contact:

Send E-mail to e-help@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 476257
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 471257

Browsers

To use Linguistics Abstracts Online we recommend you have Internet Explorer version five or higher or Netscape Navigator version six or higher. You can download Internet Explorer from www.microsoft.com and you can download Netscape Navigator from www.netscape.com. Both browsers are free to download. You might need to contact your IT Administrator before you proceed with the download of any software on your institution's terminals.

Search

Simple Search

Choose the fields you wish to search in from the drop down menu (so you can either search on any of the fields associated with our abstracts. If you are searching on multiword phrases, such as both the first and family name of an author, or the full title of a publication then place your query in between double inverted commas to get best results. For example "Stan Smith" will give you exact phrase matching on this author name whereas entering Stan Smith will return all matches on the occurrence of the words Stan or Smith. Obviously, if you enter a single word like language you will get a very large number of matches.

Search

Search screen will allow you to make searches on multiple fields. As long as you surround multiword phrases, such as titles or author names in DOUBLE INVERTED COMMAS you will get better results rather than by searching on a single word or term. Linguistics Abstracts Online allows you to search on Text (search the body of the abstract), Title (abstract title), Title in Translation and Author. You can also limit your search by specifying other parameters such as: Journal(s), Volume/Issue (this refers to volume/issue of Linguistics Abstracts journal), Subdiscipline and Date (this refers to when the abstract appeared in Linguistics Abstracts journal)

Boolean Searching

Boolean Searching adds great flexibility to our search by giving you the ability to use AND and OR with your key words. These words (also known as operators) are specially recognised by our search system when typed into the search fields in capital letters or selected from the drop down menus.

For example if you would like to search for items on ‘language’ and ‘sound’ you could do so by entering the following into the Text search field:

language AND sound

The search would return all items containing both ‘language’ and ‘sound’ somewhere within its text.

If you wanted to search for items on either ‘language’ or ‘sound’ you could enter:

language OR sound

The search would return all items containing either ‘language’ or ‘sound’ somewhere within its text.

Alternatively you could use the drop down menu to select an operator to link the different search fields together. For example if you wanted to search for Teresa Chung’s work on vocabulary used in technical texts you could:

• enter ‘technical’ into the Text field, select "AND" from the drop down menu,
• enter ‘vocabulary’ into the Abstract Title field, select "AND" from the drop down menu and
• enter ‘chung’ into the Author field

Search Results

When you execute a search your results will be displayed in the Search Results screen.

Search summary displays the summary of your search term. For instance, if you were to search for abstracts containing the word ‘pronunciation’ AND with the article title containing the word ‘language’ OR with the author name containing ‘smith’ in the ‘sociolinguistics’ subdiscipline your search summary will show:

(+content:(pronunciation) +title:(language)) authors:(smith), subdisciplines: "Sociolinguistics"

Sorting options are given below the search summary and with them you can order your search results by relevance, title, journal, subdiscipline, author or date. These links have double function so clicking on the date link once will order the results in the order of earliest published first; clicking on that link the second time will re-order the results to show the most recently published first.

Display results summary will tell you exactly how many search results your search query produced and help you orientate yourself when your search results set exceeds the length of one page (we display ten abstracts per page).

Next to every search result we display a select abstract check box. This option allows you to select more then one abstract on any search result page for inclusion into your abstract list or to send via email. Select all and clear all buttons at the bottom of the page simply select or deselect all Select abstract check boxes on that search results page.

Abstract Details

When you open the abstract detail screen you will get a screen containing all of the data associated with your chosen abstract. Bibliographical details are listed in the abstract details fields (such as abstract ID, abstract title, journal title hyperlinked to the journal detail screen, year, volume and issue, page range, subdiscipline and authors)

Underneath the body of the abstract you may notice JSTOR, SFX Open URL and CrossRef links.

JSTOR link will lead you to the full text of the abstracted article if that article is held in the JSTOR’s database. Access to JSTOR full text is only available to those institutions that have JSTOR subscriptions; however, pay per view option is available for purchasing articles on individual basis. For more information on JSTOR please go to http://www.jstor.org.

SFX Open URL technology is available only if your institution has an SFX server has been registered in our database. If you believe that you should be seeing the SFX Open URL icon but you cannot see it on this page please contact your librarian or contact us on e-help@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com. To find out more about this service please visit www.exlibris-usa.com.

CrossRef link will lead you to the full text of the abstracted article using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) technology. Unlike SFX Open URL, CrossRef link work independently of your institution but not all abstracts will have this link enabled. The access to the full text is managed separately, restrictions and charges may apply. If you would like to find out more please visit http://www.crossref.org.

Special Characters

Linguistics Abstracts Online uses Unicode (to find out more about Unicode go to www.unicode.org) to display special characters. To enter a special character as a search query copy and paste that special character either from your system's Character Map (Windows Only) or you can find the complete list of special characters on www.unicode.org/charts/.

Fonts

In order to see special characters please ensure that the terminals used to access Linguistics Abstracts Online have Unicode fonts installed. Linguistics Abstracts Online style sheet supports following font sets:

1. Lucida Sans Unicode

You can download this font from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm

2. Arial Unicode MS

This font is not freely available. The font is still available as part of Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft Publisher 2002.

3. Code 2001

You can download this font from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm.
Code2001 relies on font-smoothing (anti-aliasing) for screen display, it does not contain hinting instructions. To turn on font-smoothing in Windows 2000, [Start] - [Control Panel] - [Display] - [Effects] - check the box which says "Smooth edges of screen fonts".

4. Sans Serif

If your Linux machine doesn't support any of the above mentioned fonts, you can link your Unicode font as default Sans Serif font.

5. Arial (not Unicode supported)

This font will be installed on majority of Windows operated terminals.

Our website will firstly try to use font set number 1 (Lucida Sans Unicode). If it cannot find that font set on your terminal it will try to use font set number 2 (Arial Unicode MS) and so on. To arrange for these fonts to be installed on the terminals in your institution please consult your librarian or IT department.