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Publications user guide

Portfolio Analyser

This guide provides essential guidance on the use of the Publications section of Portfolio Analyser. Further and more detailed guidance is available in the Portfolio Analyser User Guidance [PDF, 3.46 MB]. Adobe Reader is required to open this file, which you can download from the plug-ins page.



Overview & data currency

  

The Publications section of Portfolio Analyser provides facilities for the investigation of publications and other outputs from BBSRC sponsored Institutes such as journals, books, conference proceedings, reports, theses, articles, patents, computer programs, protein and DNA sequences, plant varieties and agricultural models.

The Publications section of Portfolio Analyser is updated biannually during Spring and Autumn.


Quick start

  
  1. Use the Publications Search to define a search strategy, adding search terms or using any of the supplied search criteria as required.
  2. Submit the search strategy to retrieve a result set as a list of matching publications.

Text searching

  

Portfolio Analyser uses Lucene text search technology. This supports wildcards, Boolean and other operators to link and use query terms wherever these are employed in defining a search strategy in the Awards or Publication sections of the system.

Principles

  • A search query is broken into terms and operators
  • A term may be a single word e.g. crop or a phrase consisting of a group or words surrounded by double quotes e.g. "crop improvement"
  • Automatic correction is not applied to any misspelled words
  • Stemming is not applied to any terms
  • Wildcards can be used within a term to broaden the scope of a search (see below)
  • Multiple terms can be combined together using Boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below)
  • Boolean operators must be used as capitals i.e. OR, AND, NOT
  • Queries are not case sensitive

Using wildcards

In search context, wildcards replace a single letter or a series of letters in order to expand results.

Use the ? symbol to perform a single character wildcard search. The single wildcard search looks for terms that match with the single character replaced.

Use the * symbol to carry out a multiple wildcard search and look for 0 or more characters e.g. h*moglobin to return hemoglobin or haemoglobin, tomato* to return tomato or tomatoes.

Wildcard queries will not work when used:

  • as the first character (prefix) of a search term e.g. *nanotechnology
  • within a phrase query e.g. "gene sequenc*"

Operators

A search operator is an instruction that joins search terms to form a new, more complex query. It enables you to look for several words at once by informing Lucene how to link search terms. The most common search operators are the Boolean operators (must be used as capitals i.e. AND, OR, NOT) and the use of double quotes to specify an exact phrase or whole word. These allow the inclusion or exclusion of documents from the search results.

Search operators
Group Operator Description Example
Boolean OR Finds documents that contain at least one of the specified terms.

The OR operator links two terms and finds matching documents if either of the terms exist in a document. The OR operator helps you broaden your search by including synonyms or related terms. Note: OR is the default operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. 		crop OR plant

Finds documents containing crop or plant, or both.
AND Finds documents that contain all of the specified terms.

Use the AND operator to search for documents in which all the terms joined with the AND operator are present. Therefore, if 4 keywords are joined with AND in a search, only documents containing all 4 keywords will be returned. On the other hand, a document that contains 3 of the 4 keywords will not be returned. The AND operator helps you narrow your search. Their order is not important.

Be careful not to overuse the AND operator in a query; a search that is too specific could overlook relevant results. 		crop AND improvement AND farm

Finds documents containing all three terms.
NOT Excludes the data fields or documents that contain the specified word.

Use the NOT operator to ignore documents that contain the specified words. The NOT operator helps you narrow your search.

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term e.g. the following search will return no results NOT genetics

Be careful with the use of NOT as the attempt to narrow the search may be too exclusive and eliminate relevant documents. 		farm NOT crop

Finds documents that do not contain crop but contain farm.
Other Quotation marks

"" 		Finds documents that contain the whole word or the exact phrase.

Quotation marks can also be used to search for an exact phrase.

Note: Exact phrase queries apply to groups of terms (words, numbers, etc.), not single terms. 		"crop improvement"

Finds documents containing this exact phrase.

Definitions

  

Committee

BBSRC science programmes are administered via committees, each dealing with applications for funding in the major areas of the council’s scientific remit. The committee processing an award provides an indication of the nature of research or training being undertaken.

BBSRC occasionally reorganises its committees and therefore past awards may reflect the structures in place at the time of issuing the award. See the Research Committees for details of the current committees and their remits.

Institutes of BBSRC

The institutes deliver innovative, world class bioscience research and training, leading to wealth and job creation, generating high returns for the UK economy. They have strong links with business, industry and the wider community, and support policy development.

The institutes’ research underpins key sections of the UK economy such as agriculture, bioenergy, biotechnology, food and drink and pharmaceuticals. In addition, the institutes maintain unique research facilities of national importance.

  • The Institute for Animal Health (IAH) is a world-leading centre of excellence for research into infectious diseases of farm animals, to advance the knowledge of veterinary and medical science, and to enhance the sustainability of livestock farming.
  • The Babraham Institute undertakes innovative biomedical research to discover the molecular mechanisms that underlie normal cellular processes and functions, and how, over lifetime, their failure or abnormality may lead to disease.
  • The Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS) is a world class research and education centre at Aberystwyth University.
  • The Institute of Food Research (IFR) is a world leader in research into harnessing food for health and controlling food-related diseases.
  • The John Innes Centre (JIC) contributes over £170M annually to the UK economy and is an international centre of excellence in plant science and microbiology.
  • The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) is a national genomics and bioinformatics centre which addresses problems in agriculture, sustainable energy, food and nutrition, through novel approaches in genomics and specialising in genomics technology, high throughput data analysis, advanced bioinformatics and innovation.
  • The Roslin Institute is a BBSRC institute incorporated with the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies.
  • Rothamsted Research is the largest agricultural research centre in the UK.

Year

Portfolio Analyser data is based on a ‘calendar’ year.

Sorting

All results tables in Portfolio Analyser provide a data sorting capability. Results can be reordered by clicking the column heading to perform an ascending or descending alphabetic or numeric sort, as appropriate.

Exporting data & Terms & Conditions of Use

The Awards System provides facilities to export data via a number of file formats i.e.

  • Extensible Markup Language (XML)
  • Microsoft Excel (XLS)
  • Comma Separated Values (CSV)
  • Portable Document Format (PDF)

Users must accept the terms and conditions (opens in new window) before being permitted to proceed with an export.


Scope & Caveats

  

Portfolio Analyser contains details of Institute publications starting from 1997 to the present.

Some of the information held is provided by applicants. BBSRC does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of this data.


Contact

See Awarded grants database contacts