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.

Quick Search versus Advanced Search

The quick search feature allows you to choose a topic and/or a keyword on which to search. 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).

Advanced search adds to topic and keyword a whole lot of other criteria that allow you to restrict the search. This works as expected, except for one big difference: the keyword(s) you put in will be searched for in the following fields: title, author, and the text of the MAA Review. So one must be more careful with the choice of search term. For example, pretty much any review will include the word "book". In order to avoid getting too many results in your search, use the other fields to restrict it.

Most books with reviews include a tag with information on the reviewer. Hence, one can find all the reviews by a particular reviewer by using the reviewer's name as a keyword in the advanced search.

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

To restrict your search to books in the MAA's Basic Library List, check the box at the bottom to restrict the books to those that are in the BLL.

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:

• 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 basic theory will find more books than a search on either basic or  theory by themselves. However, books that contain both terms will be listed first.
• The search engine understands "+" and "–" as modifiers. So searching for +basic +theory will find only books that have both basic and theory, while +basic –theory will find books that have basic but not theory. 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 "basic theory" will only find books that have that exact phrase in their titles (or authors, but that seems unlikely).
• 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.
• 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 those books, but also all books that have that string anywhere (so "applied" will come up a lot).
• Some terms are "reserved", i.e., the search engine will ignore them. Unfortunately, I do not know all of them, but some examples are "plus", "think", and "more". Putting them in quotes will work, with provisos as above.
• Searching for accented words is currently 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 authors' names.) 
• 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.