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• Introduction
• Search Fields
• Description of Fields
• Boolean Operators
• Other Search Syntax
• Advanced Search
• Browsing
• Limiting Search Results
• Relevance and Sorting
• My Account
• Saving Information
• Availability
• Other Sources
• Search Tools
• How Do I ... ?
• All Topics (for printing)

Relevance and Sorting

Discovery uses a combination of factors to order search results.

Sorting

In search results, you can sort the results by selecting a field from the Sort by: menu.

You can sort by Relevance+Date, Relevance, Date, Call Number, Author, Title or ID.

See Description of Fields for explanations of Date, Call Number, Author and Title.

Relevance+Date

Relevance+Date is the default sort order if you have entered words in the search box.

Items are sorted by relevance (see below) but items with recent publication dates are boosted higher in search results.

Relevance

Relevance is determined by the search field and by stemming.

All Fields searches will search these fields and weight them in the following order:

• Title fields
• Author and subject fields
• Series, publication and contents fields
• Collection, identifier numbers, URLs, format, language, location and all other fields

Title searches weight these title fields in the following order:

• Exact full title
• Exact brief title
• Brief title starts with
• Exact phrase in brief title
• Exact phrase in full title
• Words anywhere in full title
• Phrase or words in alternate title, series, or table of contents titles
• For example, a search for

  war and peace

  will rank items with exactly the full title war and peace highest and show them first in search results.

Author searches will search primary authors, additional authors, and authors listed in the table of contents.

Subject searches will search topic, geographic, genre and era fields.

Date

Publication Date is the default sort order when there is no search term in the search box, e.g. when browsing from Discovery home.

ID

ID is the identifier of a record. Higher IDs are shown first and generally indicate more recently catalogued items.

The source and format of the ID depends on the source of the data.

• For Library Catalog records, the ID is the bibliographic number.
• For Digital Repository records, the ID is a locally assigned, persistent number called the PID.
• For Colorado State University Libraries Web pages, the ID is the URL of the page.

If you need to sort by ID, it will probably help to limit your results to a single source.