Search Overview
The Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA) allows you to search the full text of each document as well as data about each document (metadata) such as author, title, and date. By default, DIDA searches the entire record, meaning the full document text as well as the metadata fields. For more precise results, you can specify a field or fields to search. Read about searching in specific fields below.

DIDA supports searches ranging from extremely broad to very specific. By default, the system retrieves documents containing all of your search terms. The simplest search is for a single term, such as gabapentin. A search for gabapentin will retrieve all documents containing that term in either the document text or the document metadata.

Note that optical character recognition (OCR), the process of creating readable text from a document image, is far from perfect and therefore, no search is guaranteed to find every document containing a search term.


Combining Terms using Boolean Operators
Use Boolean operators (named after mathematician George Boole) to combine search terms in a variety of ways. Using Boolean operators allows you to craft more precise searches, especially when used to search specific fields.

DIDA supports Boolean operators in the following formats:

AND      +      &&
OR         ||
NOT        -       !

Examples:

To find documents in which both terms occur:

gabapentin AND migraine
gabapentin + migraine
gabapentin && migraine

To find documents in which either term occurs:

gabapentin OR migraine
gabapentin || migraine

To find documents in which the term gabapentin does appear and migraine does not appear:

gabapentin NOT migraine
gabapentin - migraine
gabapentin ! migraine

Note: DIDA assumes an AND between two or more terms.

Back to top

Phrases
To search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. "Neurontin marketing plan" will retrieve all documents containing the phrase "Neurontin marketing plan" anywhere within the document text or metadata. Search for documents that contain two or more phrases by entering all of the phrases: "Neurontin marketing plan," "marketing strategy," "marketing materials." To find documents that contain at least one of several phrases, separate the phrases with OR: "marketing plan" OR "marketing strategy" OR "marketing materials."

Back to top

Searching in Specific Fields
Search for information in specific fields instead of in the entire record by specifying metadata fields. DIDA supports searches of any combination of document text and fields. The simplest fielded query would be one specifying a single field, such as the author field as follows.

Search syntax: Search_field_abbreviation:search_term
Example: ti:migraine

Note that no space appears between the search field, colon, and search term.

To look for two or more different terms in the same field, enclose them in parentheses or list them separately:

ti:(Neurontin OR gabapentin)
ti:Neurontin OR ti:gabapentin

Combine searches in the same or in different fields using AND, OR, NOT.

ca:Parke-Davis AND ti:gabapentin
ti:gabapentin NOT dt:article
ti:nicotine NOT dt:article
ti:(Neurontin OR gabapentin) AND dt:(press release OR advertisement)

Back to top

Date Ranges
Restrict a search to documents dated within a certain timeframe by specifying a date range in the document date (dd) field. Note that the ability to search within a date range is limited.

Search syntax: dd:[yyyymmdd TO yyyymmdd]

Example:
dd:[19950132 TO 19971231]

Back to top

Wildcards and Proximity Searching
Wildcards
Wildcards can stand in for one or more unknown letters or numbers. Use the single character wildcard "?" to search for variant spellings. For example, organi?ation would find organisation and organization. Use the multiple character wildcard "*" to find several variations of a term. Example: epilep* would find epilepsy, epileptic, and epileptics.

Please note that overly broad wildcard searches will result in an error message.

Proximity search Proximity searches find terms that appear near each other. To do a proximity search use "~" at the end of a quoted phrase followed by a number indicating within how many words of each other terms should be. For example to search for "Neurontin" and "migraine" within 10 words of each other enter "Neurontin migraine"~10. Proximity searches are useful in full text searching when terms can appear pages apart from each other.

Back to top

DIDA Search Tips

• When searching for a drug, use both brand and generic names.

• When searching for a Bates number, use the following format: bn:x023684*

• When searching for an Exhibit, to retrieve all related items use the format en:91*

• Too many results? Focus your search by...
  • adding a word or phrase
  • specifying the order in which you want words to appear with proximity operators
  • using a more specific term or phrase
  • limiting the query to a specific field or fields
  • limiting the query by date
• Too few results? Broaden your search by...
  • removing a word or phrase
  • not searching for exact phrases
  • trying synonyms or variant word forms
  • searching in all fields
  • removing date range limitations