Help File

 

The program allows you to perform a literature search on (currently) the following journals:

The Journal of the Oughtred Society (All volumes to Vol 32 No. 2 2023)

You may search using any one or more of four fields, where the fields have the following significance:

Author:	  The author of the article.  References to all articles authored or co-authored
          by the given author are returned. 

Title:	  The title of the article. References to all articles with the given title are
          returned. 

Keyword:  References to all articles associated with the given keyword are returned.
	  A "keyword" may consist of a string of more than one word (without the quotes).
	  All the text in every article is searched.

Citation: Names of (usually) slide rule collectors and/or dealers appearing in the article.
          References to all articles with the specified name are returned.  Surnames only
	  should be used in this field; otnes will succeed, bob otnes will fail.

Year:	 May be used to restrict the search to a specific year.


Searches are performed on the exact phrase (but see below) given in each field. However, it is
not necessary to know the exact contents of any field that you are searching for. Thus fuller 
appearing in the title field will return references to all articles with fuller in the title.

IN ALL CASES the case (upper or lower) of the search string in all fields is ignored.

IN GENERAL IT IS FAR BETTER TO PROVIDE TOO LITTLE INFORMATION THAN TOO MUCH.  Thus fuller calculators
in the title field will return no matches; fuller will result in more success.

The five fields are 'ANDED' together.  Thus a search with otnes in the Author field and log
in the Title field will return references to articles authored by otnes and containing log
in the title (such as log-log, logarithm, catalog etc.)

It would be rare therefore to use more than two fields simultaneously.

For more advanced users, a period, ".", may be used to match any character.  Thus a string log.log
in the title field will match all titles containing log-log, log log etc.

It follows that a "." by itself in the Author field will return a list of ALL articles available.

The pipe, "|", may be used as OR.  Thus wyman|aldinger in the author field will match all articles 
authored by Wyman or Aldinger.

Any number of "." and "|" may be used in any field in any combination.

Articles with no stated Author have been attributed to "The Editors".

English/American input has been assumed throughout. Thus umlauts, graves, circumflexes etc., are not supported
and should not be used.

If you wish, you may observe the first paragraph of all matching articles by using the checkbox, 
Display First Paragraph. 

The order in which the successfully matched articles are displayed may be controlled with the "Display Order"
radio button. Chronological order is with ascending date article.

All the articles found by successful searches are "clickable" so that they may be viewed in full. 

If "Display JOS Index" is selected all other fields are ignored and the complete JOS index is displayed.
All articles in this Index are clickable.

It may be found convenient to set the magnification of the displayed articles to other than   
the default value. The magnification control at the top of the displayed pdf article allows this to be done.

All files for display are in pdf format.  The display of these files is controlled by your browser and your pdf reader software.

In the possible event of problems in the display of these files, the following help file may be found useful: Help



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