MAA Reviews

There are two ways to search for books on MAA Reviews: the quick search engine that appears at the top left of each page, and the advanced search, which gives you many more options and ways to restrict the range of your search. Knowing a little about how the search engine works will help make your searches more efficient. Below I have put the things you type into the keyword field in red, because it makes a difference whether you type in quotes or not!

Quick Search versus Advanced Search

The quick search feature allows you to choose a topic and/or a keyword on which to search. You need not do both. The search engine looks for books that have your keyword in either the title or the author fields (and, if you chose a topic, that are listed as being on that topic). So if you put in field and hit the search button. you will find all books whose authors or titles include that world (but not any that include "fields").

Keywords that are shorter than four letters do not work, and accented characters can cause searches to fail. In addition, there are certain "stopwords" that the search engine can't handle. You can see a full list here, but for our purposes note that it contains brief, course, and many number words such as zero. None of those will work in a search.

Advanced search allows you to specify which fields you want the search engine to look at when it tries to find your keyword. You can choose as many of them as you like. By default they are all turned on, but I find it more useful to choose only a few.

Notice that you can restrict your search in many other ways: to books that have been reviewed, can restrict to books received (or reviewed) on particular dates, to books in the BLL and even with particular BLL ratings, and so on. This is the best way to find out "what's new" or "what reviews have been added recently". Books are added to the database when we receive them, and reviews are added later.

For those who are real book geeks, way in the bottom there is a box that allows you to search by ISBN.

Searching for Multiple Words

Sometimes one wants more than one keyword. Here are the rules:

• If you enter multiple keywords, the search will find books containing any of your keywords, with those that contain all of your keywords presented first. So searching for abstract algebra will find more books than a search on either abstract or  algebra by themselves. Books are listed in alphabetical order by title, so this is unlikely to yield useful results unless you really want either/or.
• The search engine understands "+" and "–" as modifiers. So searching for +abstract +algebra will find only books that have both abstract and algebra, which is probably what you want. Using +abstract –algebra will find books that have abstract but not algebra. Notice that if you use these modifiers you need to put them in front of each of your search terms.
• You can search for a specific phrase by putting it in quotes. So a search for "abstract algebra" will only find books that have that exact phrase, so you won't find, say, a book called Algebra: Abstract and Concrete.

Search Engine Quirks

Every search engine has its weird quirks. As you play with the search engine, you'll probably get used to most of them. Here are the main things to know:

• Terms in quotes are treated as strings, so using quotes you can also search on roots or partial words. Searching on "quad" will find books with "quadratic", "quadrangular", etc. Many things that aren't allowed outside quotes will work inside them.
• Search terms must have at least four letters (we apologize to those who study Lie theory!). Searching on Lie will find no books at all (and the message you get won't be very helpful). Searching on "lie" will find all books containing that string, which (alas) includes every book containing "applied". Searching on "lie " (with a space) comes a little closer, but won't find Lie-theoretic.
• As mentioned above, some terms are "reserved", i.e., the search engine will ignore them. The list is here, but some examples are course, plus, think, and more. Putting them in quotes will work, with provisos as above.
• Searching for accented words is problematic. If you know the html tags for the accented letters, that sometimes works. In general, however, try to find another term to search on. This mostly affects publishers and authors' names. To find "Birkhäuser", I usually search on the string "birk", for example.
• In the quick search, it is possible to do a search with no keywords and no topic; this will find every single book in the database. In advanced search, this will not work, but you can always ask for all books with prices between 0 and 1,000,000,000…

Good luck searching! Please let us know if you find any problems, or you discover other quirks we should mention here.