Getting Started with OSF Search (Video)

OSF Search is your destination for discovering all content types across the platform, including results for registrations, preprints, projects (and related components), files, and users in one easy to use interface. The OSF Search page can be used for searching, browsing, or both.

Each search result includes key metadata to help you determine if these are the results you are looking for, as well as a "Context" section in each result that provides a preview of the metadata fields that reference your search term.

Refine your search results or browse the entire OSF using specialized filters, including supporting funder, institutions, resource type, related materials, and more.

Finally, remember to make your own OSF research as discoverable as possible by adding robust metadata and making it public.

Outline:

Video Description: Follow along with a clip of our training OSF 101 videos to learn about searching on the OSF. For more information or full-length videos see our training and live events page

Navigating to the OSF Search Page 

You can always navigate to the OSF search page by clicking "Search" at the top navbar on any OSF page, or navigate to https://osf.io/search/.


Selections and searches found on the OSF Registries landing page or OSF Preprint landing page will also lead to the OSF Search page.


Searching by Term 

  • In the search bar, enter a search term (#1) and then click the magnifying glass (#2) or hit the "Enter" key. Your search term can be as short, long, specific, or general as you like.

Crafting your search terms carefully can help to make your results more precise. OSF search recognizes a number of different search operators which are described in more depth at the end of this help guide.


Interpreting Your Search Results

The total number of results for your query is presented in the top left.  If there are more than 10,000 results, it will only read "10,000+ results".  Modify your query or use filters to reduce and specify your results.

The search result cards provide a preview of the content within, with the key metadata based on the object type.


Each card represents one of the following in OSF:


All result cards will have a "Context" section. This section will preview exactly where your search term appears as part of this object, including a snippet of this relevant section. Your search term will be italicized. 


Sort results:

Once you have refined your result list based on the OSF Smart Facets, you can sort your results using the drop-down list at the right of the object type filters based on:

  • Relevance
  • Date Created, Newest
  • Date Created, Oldest
  • Date Modified, Newest
  • Date Modified, Oldest

Find out more about how the OSF determines relevance


Choosing the correct resources


After you have refined your search you will see a list of results. Each will display the metadata most relevant to that object type, indicating what is included in that resource. To see a full expanded version of the metadata click the {V} arrow button to expand the available metadata. 


All results on your list will be populated with the following: 


  • A Gray box indicates if the resource is a Project, registration, Preprint, file, or User. (#1)
  • Title with link to the resource (#2)
  • Contributors or authors (#3)
  • Date created or registered (#4)
  • Context and keywords (#5)
  • Dropdown arrow for more information (#6)
    • Description (#7)
    • License (#8)
    • URL (#9)
    • Digital Object Identifier (DOI) (#10)

Registrations include unique metadata:

  • List of connected open resources (#11)
  • Inside Drop-down Arrow 
    • Descriptions (#12)
    • Registration provider (#13)
    • Registration templates (#14)

Refine Refine Results with Filters or Search Operators

If your search results are not precise enough, you can use several different methods to refine the results.


Refine Results Or Browse by OSF Object Types

Use the object type filters above the search results to limit your results to a specific OSF object type, or display all object types.

The available object types are:

Refine Results Using Filters

Filters allow users to refine their search results based terms present in the metadata of the results. These filters are dynamic in nature and will change the number of results and even add or reduce the other populating filters based on which items you select. Each option within the filters will also display the number of results that will be available if you make that selection.

Types of Filters:

Filter: Definition: 
Date Created  Allows you to create ranges of time when the results were created and posted 
Funder Filter by specific funders listed on the metadata of the result
Subject Filter based on the disciplines that you can choose for registrations and preprints
License Filter based on the license type of the results
Resource Type (General) An alternative way to filter based on resources in OSF metadata. See more here: Resource type in OSF
Institution  Filter based on current OSF institution members. Only current paid members will populate 
Provider  Provider corresponds to service providers located within the OSF
Is part of a collection Filter for materials that are part of Collections on the OSF
Registration Template  If you are searching for registrations you can filter by the template used during the creation 
Data Filter by different data types 
Subject Filter by subject type
Includes Community Schema Find OSF content with attached community metadata standards via CEDAR. See more here: CEDAR and data management

How to search within a filter

If you are browsing within a filter and there are still too many results, you can refine your search term or you can add additional facets to find the specific works that you are interested in exploring. To do this you will need to:

Click on the facet drop-down arrow:

The values within the filter that have the most relevant results will be listed.


To find additional values click "See More" at the bottom of the list (if the "See more" link is not available all known results are currently displaying).

.

A pop-up will appear. You can then search for the specific value that you are looking for. Only relevant results will populate.

  • Select a value and click "Apply". This will apply the funders to your search criteria.

Refine Results Using Search Operators

We recently enhanced OSF Search, to include some ability to replicate boolean search special character search operators. These search enhancements are described below with examples for how the search queries will return results. (If you are interested in understanding these in more depth, you can read the Elasticsearch simple_query_string query documentation).


" " wraps a number of terms to signify a phrase for searching

Putting your search terms in quotes ensures adjacent words are searched as a phrase and not as individual words. Searching  “Maternal Depression” without quotes will return results where the database found those individual words anywhere in the source.

Example 1: “Maternal Depression” vs Maternal Depression

“Maternal Depression”

https://osf.io/search?q=%22maternal%20depression%22 ; 138 results all containing the phrase "Maternal Depression."


Maternal Depression

https://osf.io/search?q=maternal%20depression ; 411 results containing the terms "Maternal" and or "Depression" anywhere in the metadata.

+ signifies AND operation

This will ensure both terms MUST be present in results, but may be anywhere in the document in any order (boolean “AND” operation). This is the default way any terms will be combined in OSF, so even if you do not include the "+" sign between terms, your query will only return results with all of the terms.

Example 1: research + reproducible

https://osf.io/search?q=research%20%2B%20reproducible


Example 2: research reproducible

https://osf.io/search?q=research%20%2B%20climate


| signifies OR operation

If you want to broaden a search to include either of two terms or phrases, boolean “OR” operation replace the “OR” with | (pipe or vertical bar). This will ensure either of the terms in the query will be present in any results.

Example 1: maternal | paternal

https://osf.io/search?q=maternal%20%20%7C%20paternal


Example 2: positive | affirmative

https://osf.io/search?q=positive%7C%20affirmative&resourceType=Project%2CProjectComponent

* at the end of a term searches for words that start with that term

The * (asterisk) operator is useful for finding multiple iterations of a word starting with the same letters. "CAT*" would return cat, cats, catholic, cathartic, etc.

Example: pos*

https://osf.io/search?q=pos*


( ) indicates grouping of terms

Combining terms within parentheses ( ) creates groups of terms that can then be combined. This is helpful when combining multiple complex concepts. Groups can be combined or nested in multiple ways

Example 1: ("climate change") | ("global warming")

returns results containing "climate change" or "global warming"

https://osf.io/search?q=(%22climate%20change%22)%20%7C%20(%22global%20warming%22)


Example 2: (("climate change") | ("global warming")) "systematic review"

returns results with "climate change" or "global warming" AND the phrase "systematic review"

https://osf.io/search?q=((%22climate%20change%22)%20%7C%20(%22global%20warming%22))%20%22systematic%20review%22


~ after a word enables broader or "fuzzy" matching

This operator is useful when finding matches with words that are similar, but may have differences with character order or number (e.g. finding both color  and colour  or finding misspellings like accomodate  and acommodate ). The operator can be combined with a number to indicate how many differences are acceptable.

Example 1: girafe~1

returns results containing words that match the term or are different by any single character, or single difference in the order of characters.

https://osf.io/search?q=girafe~1



Example 2: girafe~

returns results that contain some of the same characters as the query term but may occur in a different order, or may contain alternate or additional characters

https://osf.io/search?q=girafe~

How does OSF Search Determine Relevance

For blank searches of all of the OSF:

When a user first opens the OSF Search page, and no search terms have been entered, the OSF just retrieves a random set of results and returns that with the idea that you are seeing a sample of what is in OSF

For specific searches using terminology:

For the result of a search query, the algorithm we use to determine relevance is the default provided by the tool the OSF uses for indexing, Elasticsearch (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/8.9/similarity.html). Specifically, that algorithm is called Okapi BM25 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25). Simplistically, the algorithm looks at all the words in the text (in this case the metadata record) and compares the total number of times the query words appear. That general idea is used in lots of ranking algorithms and is called TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

Example: if the query term appears 10 times in a 100-word record that would be a higher frequency compared to a record where the term appears 25 times in a 1,000,000-word document. So while the term appears more frequently, it occurs less often compared to the size of the text




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