Tip on searching for author names within PDFs (research pape

DEVONthink Tips
1

I have picked up a lot of tips from the forums so I thought I would add this tip (warning long preamble).

I use DT to catalogue a large collection of PDFs. These are published research papers from various scientific journals. DT has been fantastic for searching for key words within articles but often when I search by author, the articles fail to come up in the search result. All the articles are described as “PDF+Text” in the database, so should be searchable.

Here’s an example of a failed search (searching for a paper in Science on prostate cancer and histones by Peter Savage and Jim Allison+6 other authors):

  1. Search content in PDF folder with keywords “prostate” and “histone” brings up 45 articles. The desired article is #4 on the list of found items.
  2. Search content in PDF folder with keywords “prostate” and “histone” and “savage” brings up 4 articles, with desired article at #2.
  3. Search content in PDF folder with keywords “prostate” and “histone” and “Allison” brings up 5 articles, but not the desired article?

Interestingly using the same combination of “prostate” and “histone” and any other author except “Allison” brings up the result.
I thought I was going crazy until I realised that Allison was the last author, so had a footnote appended to his name. If I search again with “prostate” and “histone” and “Allison1”, the right result comes up!

So the tip is (maybe not worth the wait), when searching for last or first authors within a research article, to select the fuzzy search option (LH side of full search box). This will overcome the possibility of missing articles because the footnote symbols or numbers are added to names. Somebody out there may have a more elegant or precise solution?

2

You could also use wildcards, e.g. ~Allison or Allison. Usually that’s faster and more precise.

3

Thank you, that works much better.