search help:

Concept Search = Relevant Results

• OnePetro uses Autonomy search technology, which is concept, not keyword based.
  (You can treat it as if it was Google, but you'll get better results if you give it more information so it can return the most relevant results.)

• The default sort order is relevance. As with many search engines, the number of overall results may be high, but most users are able to find what they need in the top 25. If you do not find what you are looking for, try to search with more complete phrases or added information.
• Relevance is based on Autonomy's interpretation of how well the document matches the concepts in your search. It is using all of the information it has about a paper to make that determination (Title, abstract, and full text when available). If you give it sufficient information in your search request, customers report excellent results.
• While the default order of search results is by relevance, you can choose to sort your results by paper number or year (most recent year first) if that better suits your research needs. The relevance will still be shown in your results for reference.
• If you enter only a couple of keywords, you'll see that a large number of documents have the same relevance. That's because all the search engine could do was identify documents that include those words – it didn't have enough information to determine which were most relevant to what you are really looking for. Give it more information about what you want to know and it will be able to put the "best" matches first.

In an advanced search, you can search for terms in specific fields: abstract, article title, keywords, authors, and publication year.

• Anywhere in Article: the full text of the article, along with all the following fields.
• Title & Abstract: text in the title or abstract of the article.
• Title Only: words (and their stem-related cognates) in the article title.
• Abstract Only: words (and their stem-related cognates) in the article abstract only.
• Author: last name (and, optionally, initials or first name) of the article's author. A search in this field will not find authors cited in the article. For more on author-name searches, see below.
• Affiliation: The author's employer (affiliation). Note: not all documents that have information on the author's employer.
  Journal: Specific journal name you wish to search in.
• Conference: Either the full name, or a portion of the name where the paper was presented.

After selecting a field from the drop-down menu, enter your search term in the box. You can search across more than one field at a time using the Boolean operators given in the AND/OR drop-down menus.

If a search involves terms in all three boxes, the Boolean operators between the boxes are interpreted in the order in which they appear. Thus, the following search request is treated as ("print culture" OR "book culture") AND gutenberg.

Titles
To get an exact match on the title try putting it in quotation marks (e.g., "corrosion rate prediction"). If you aren't certain you have the words exactly right or in the right order, enter your search without quotes and you will get variations that may help you locate the right paper.

Author names
Remember that an author might be listed in a variety of ways (e.g., Ramey, H.J.; Ramey Jr., H.J., H.J. Ramey Jr.; Hank Ramey; Ramey, Jr., Harold). If the author has an unusual last name, just input the last name. For someone with a common last name, you may have to enter multiple options to search using the AND option.

Note:   When you input an author name, the search engine can only look for authors with that name and assume all are similarly relevant to your query. As a result of this, all papers by authors with that name are displayed in the order of society. Because in some cases company names are included in the same field as author, your search may return some documents not by that author.

To search for an author formatted last name first, you need to put the entry in quotes (e.g., "Smith, G.E.", "Jones, Carl") If you don't enclose your request in quotes, the search engine would see the request as two separate terms -- Smith and G.E., which would get more results than you intended, but would still return the papers by that author.

Affiliation
The author's employer (affiliation) is not always available. The search engine will return results based on the documents that have information on the author's employer, but a document count would be incomplete because of documents that do not have that information. Many of the older documents from WPC and others do not include the author's employer.

For older papers, the word "and" is likely to be spelled out rather than as "&" (e.g., "Texas A and M", Arco R and D). You may need to try your search both ways.

Year
Year search will return you papers for only the years you specify. You can enter single years, ranges (2000-2005), or before/after (<1990, >2000). More information about coverage

Limit your search by organization.
SPE is the currently largest collection available in OnePetro. As a result, many of your searches may return a number of SPE documents on the first pages. If you don't find what you are looking for, select to refine search and uncheck the societies you do not wish to get results from.

If you are looking for a single, specific document based on a reference, paper number, or other known information, click the link "Specific Document." This will take you to a separate search screen. Once you select the organization, you will be able to add the identifying information to locate the specific document.

Please Note: On the Specific Article search page, OnePetro has a drop down list of all the journals currently available. If you select a specific journal, it will not require that you also enter an organization.

Some organizations have doi as field to search on. What is doi?

If you are unable to locate the document you seek, please check the coverage of documents in OnePetro.

• More words=better results. Search by relevance works best with three or more words.
• Search is case sensitive! If you enter title case such as" World Oil Fields Nigeria" the search will assume that the title case indicates a proper name and will return only results that contain " World Oil Fields Nigeria". When in doubt, it is best to always use lower case, for example: "world oil fields nigeria".
• In some search engines, words in parentheses are evaluated together before the whole query is evaluated.  This is not currently an option in OnePetro's advanced search but may be included at a future date.
• If you select to search for your term or phrase in the full article, you cannot use the "OR" operator on a specific field. "Anywhere in the article" automatically sets the criteria to look in the full record, the program cannot limit the search to just one field for an additional criteria.

For example:

      Corrosion (Anywhere in article)
     
      OR

      Smith (Author)

      ..will return an error and will reset the search to "AND".

• Too many results? Try limiting your search by selecting only the organizations you feel are relevant to your query. By default, the search is set up to search all the organizations listed for your query. (For example: if you know the author wrote the paper for NACE, enter the author's name, and leave only NACE checked under organizations.)
• Looking for a paper from a particular meeting? Enter either the full name, or a portion of the name where the paper was presented.

Note: if you enter both a meeting and select a journal from the drop down menu, you will not get any search results

After you enter your search terms and click the Search button, you will first see an area of search results with a blank space to the right. A few seconds later, the right column will appear.

Search categorization is displayed to the right. This categorization is only ever for the top 500 results (based on relevance of documents to your search criteria).

• The first area of categorization is by society. The number in parenthesis after the society indicates the number of documents from that society included in the top 500 search results. This gives you a quick method to see which of the organizations included in OnePetro has the largest number of documents related to your search request.
• The second area of categorization is by author. The number in parenthesis indicates the number of documents in the top 500 authored or co-authored by an individual. This will allow you to identify who has written a lot on your topic of interest. Note: This is based on how the author's name was shown on the document. So H.J. Ramey, Harold Ramey, and Hank Ramey, Jr. would show up as 3 different people. The results are displayed in order, with only the top 10 shown. You can click the More... link to see the rest of the list. Be forewarned that it will be very long.
• The third area of categorization is by Affiliation (author's employer). This information does not exist for all documents. Results are based on those for which the information is available. This allows you to quickly identify what organizations have been active in the area of your search. Note: This is based on how the author's company is listed in the metadata for each document. So Institut Français du Petrole and Institute Francais du Petrole (IFP) are seen as two different organizations. The results are displayed in order, with only the top 10 shown. You can click the More... link to see the rest of the list. Be forewarned that it will be very long.

What happens if I click on an item in the categorization?

If you click on a society, author, or company, your original search is re-executed with the additional constraint of that society, author, or company. The categorization at right will remain unchanged, but the search results set will change.

Why is my number of search results different from the number in the categorization?

The categorization is limited to the top 500 results. If you had more than 500 total results in your original search (1,024 in the example above), re-executing the search is looking for that society, author or company across your entire result set, so the number found may be larger than what was shown for the top 500.

Why doesn't the categorization change when I click on an item in the categorization?

We kept the categorization constant so that you could easily click through a series of authors or companies to see what they were writing about.

1. Provide as much information as possible (more detail = better results)

For example, "reservoir modeling" will return a very large number of results. "Reservoir modeling in carbonates" will provide a more focused group of responses. "Reservoir modeling in carbonates in West Texas" gives an even more focused group of results that may be able to help you locate the information you need quickly. Don't be afraid to use industry terminology. Tell it what you really want to know.

2. Numbers, punctuation and special characters may have unintended effects, so avoid them as much as possible

Do not use a question mark at the end of your query. The search engine treats it as a wild card character at the end of the last word, which may affect its understanding of your request. If a term is or may be hyphenated (e.g., highly-fractured, multi-phase, one-trip), you may want to try your search both with and without the hyphen, as responses may differ, especially when use of the hyphen depends on sentence structure.

3. Consider spelling differences and synonyms where appropriate

The search engine automatically "stems" words down to their root word and considers all words with the same root to be a match (e.g., expand, expanding, expanded, expandable). But it does not automatically account for the differences in U.S. and British spelling of certain words (e.g., favor and favour). Since the search engine is looking through documents from around the world, if a word with alternate spellings is important to your query, you may want to input both as part of your request.

OnePetro uses a secure checkout process (note the lock in the lower right of your browser) that is verified by Verisign. We take your online security very seriously.

All purchases in OnePetro require a credit card for payment. You will go through a series of screens to enter:

• Billing address (which should match the billing address for the credit card you are using)
• Payment information (including security code)
• Confirmation of your order.

NOTE: If you choose to purchase papers in GBP or EUR, you must use Visa or Mastercard. American Express will only accept USD transactions.

When your transaction is complete, a receipt page will be displayed. From that page you can print a copy of your receipt (for your records or expense reimbursement) and you can go directly to a page for downloading the documents you purchased. In case you are unable to download your purchases immediately, or encounter difficulties, an email with information for printing a receipt and downloading documents will be sent to the email address you provided. You will have 6 calendar days to download your purchased documents.

You will have 6 calendar days from the date of purchase to download your documents.

On the download page, the title of the document is a hyperlink. Internet Explorer users who click on the link will be asked whether they would prefer to open the document or save it to their computer. The fastest method is to save it to your computer. I.E. users also have the option to right-click, Save Target As... to save directly to their hard drive. Firefox/Mozilla users will be prompted to save the document to their desktop.

Use of robots, intelligent agents, or download accelerators is strictly prohibited. These tools negatively impact site performance for all users.

If you encounter difficulty in downloading your papers within the time frame allowed, please contact Customer Service at +1.972.952.9323 or service@onepetro.org for assistance.

The search engine is trying to find the documents that are most relevant to your search and is organizing results according to relevance. When your search includes only one or two words (i.e., an author's name) it doesn't have much information to go on, so the rationale for the order in which they are displayed may not be obvious. When it has no other basis for organizing items (i.e., all have the same relevance), it is defaulting to an internal control number that will not necessarily reflect either date or paper number.

If you prefer to sort your results by paper number or year, you can choose one of those options using the drop down on your search results or on the advanced options page. Year will always begin with the most current year. Paper number will start with the largest paper number.

The search engine is trying to be helpful in case you didn't know the name or title exactly, and also returning "close" matches. If you want an exact match only, enclose your request in quotation marks (e.g., "corrosion rate prediction "). But if you're searching for an author, remember that the author's name may have been entered several different ways, so quotation marks will decrease the liklihood of finding all of that author's papers.

Why don't I see a link to add my paper to a cart?

You may have visited them on a previous search. Information about previously visited links is held in your browser's history files. So even though you have not visited the link during this particular browser session, if the information about a prior visit remains in your browser's history, the link will show up as visited. To reduce this, you can shorten the amount of history retained by your browser. For Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options. On the General Tab, there is a place to specify the number of days to retain history and a button to clear the history.

OnePetro puts a cookie on your computer with the items in your cart. This cookie clears when you complete the transaction, or it expires in 6 days. We did this to assist users who experience connectivity issues mid-transaction. The items in the cart would be from an incomplete transaction the last time you visited SPE. If you no longer want these documents, use the Remove link next to those items on the View Cart page.

Not necessarily. If you are an member of one of our participating societies (such as SPE or ARMA) and want to receive the member discount, or if you have access to certain corporate or individual subscriptions, you will need to log in. But non-member users who visit infrequently and just want to purchase papers with a credit card will be able to complete a transaction without logging in.

The size of pdf documents in OnePetro varies widely. While some are small, as authors take advantage of improving technology to include more color graphics, figures, and photos in their papers, file size is generally increasing. While there are exceptions, most companies limit email attachments to a size of 1MB or even less. Many papers in OnePetro exceed this file size, so emailing papers is not practical. Pdf is a pretty efficient file format, such that "zipping" them makes little difference in the file size (often 5% or less reduction in file size). So "zipping" will not reduce the file size enough to make email delivery practical. For now, OnePetro does not have a mechanism that would allow you to zip numerous papers into a single document before download (not to reduce size, just to reduce the number of downloads). We know that there is customer interest in this option and we will continue to investigate whether this is something that could potentially be offered in the future. But it is not clear whether this will be feasible.

First, check your spam filter to make certain that the email wasn't caught accidentally. While OnePetro has carefully constructed the email to avoid triggering spam filters, unexpected results are always possible. If you have the option, you may want to "whitelist" email from service@onepetro.org to be certain that your email gets to you. If you have checked your spam filter and still did not receive the email, contact SPE Customer Service at service@spe.org or 1.972.952.9393. Provide them with information that will help them identify your specific transaction, such as the date, your name and email, and any other information that might be helpful.

While many of the pdfs in the OnePetro can be viewed with Acrobat Reader v. 5, beginning with papers published after 1 May 2005, v. 6 or higher of Acrobat Reader is required. As technology has improved, authors have taken advantage to provide more color graphics and photos in their papers. Many of these will not display properly with older versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Upgrade your Reader