Website search help

• Help with quick search
• Help with advanced search
• Help with searching for Library resources

Before you start

• We use the term 'document' here to refer to any online information - whether it is an HTML page or a downloadable file, such as a PDF or presentation.
• Text in courier font denotes text that is typed into the search boxes.

Quick search

Basic tips

To run a quick search on the CIPD website, enter a few descriptive words and click "Go". Use words that are likely to appear in the documents you are looking for.

Entering multiple words

Entering multiple words can be a good way of ensuring that you find what you are looking for. The more words you supply, the more the search engine has to go on.

To search for multiple words, separate them with spaces. For example:

constructive dismissal

The logic the search engine uses to find the most relevant documents for you is complex, but hopefully most of the time it just works and you do not need to worry too much how.

However, it helps to know a little about what is going on in the background, so this is roughly how it works:

The search engine will try to find documents that best match your search words, it will consider documents that contain the exact phrase you type in as more relevant than documents that just contain the individual words. So using the example above, documents that just contain the words 'constructive' or 'dismissal' would appear lower in the search results than documents that contain the phrase 'constructive dismissal'.

The search engine uses lots of other techniques to attempt to find the most relevant documents to your search, for example if it finds a document that contains your search words in the title, that document is quite likely to be relevant to your search - probably more relevant than a document that only mentions your search words in the body of the document.

Searching for an exact phrase

Use double quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. For example, to search for documents about the Data Protection Act, rather than documents that just contain the individual words 'Data', 'Protection' and 'Act', type:

"data protection act"

Plain language

You can use plain language, for example by entering a question or concept, however the search engine will identify what it considers to be the important words and exclude the rest:

How do I manage organisational stress?

This query produces the same results as entering:

manage organisational stress

Query syntax

Queries are interpreted according to the following rules:

• individual search terms are separated by white space characters, such as a space, tab, or comma, as in the following example:

  cake recipe

• search phrases are entered within double quotes, as in the following example:

  "chocolate cake" recipe

• use minus ( - ) to exclude words, as in the following example:

  cake recipes -rum

  or use 'not':

  cake recipes not rum

• use plus ( + ), to make words compulsory as in the following example:

  cake recipes +chocolate

  This example requires the term chocolate to be present.

Search categories

The CIPD website search, by default, divides search results up into categories. These categories are:

• Practical advice, guidance, tools...
• Surveys, research, reports...
• News
• Online discussion and networking
• CIPD and membership
• From the CIPD Bookstore
• Events
• Courses and qualifications
• Library resources
• Everything else

Why categories?

Excluding categories

If you know which categories you are interested in you can restrict your search to those categories. By un-checking the categories that you are not interested in you exclude them from your search

In the example below, we are searching for courses and events only.

Overriding categorisation

If you do not like the category-style presentation, you can use the options at the bottom of the search results to get a more traditional list of results, ordered by relevance. This feature can also be useful if you are looking for a specific document, but are not sure which category it belongs to.

Use the 'Don't group results by category' option to see results in a traditional list-style

Results from People Management magazine

Selected results

The People Management archive contains thousands of articles from CIPD's People Management magazine, dating back to 1998. For some users, perhaps those researching a subject in-depth, this is a valuable resource, but other users just want the most relevant and up-to-date articles.

To give you the best of both worlds we include selected People Management articles in the CIPD search, but exclude some of the older and less relevant articles.

View all People Management results

If you want to view all People Management results (not just the ones we have selected), click on the tab labelled 'Results from People Management website'.

click on the tab labelled 'View all People Management results' to see all results from People Management

CIPD recommended results

If there is a page that we can direct you to that we think is an obvious starting point for the search you have entered, we will include it at the top of the search results page, under the heading 'CIPD recommended results'.

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search gives you more control over your search query, for example you can specify a date range to search between, for a particular author, or documents that only mention your search words in the title.

You can use the Advanced Search to search for CIPD Library resources (there is no longer a separate Library search function on the site but see the section on help with searching for Library resources if you want to find only these), books to buy, training courses, CIPD events, web pages and much more.

All fields in the Advanced Search that allow you to enter text support a search language, which is gives you more control over your search; it's easy to learn the basics of this search language and there are more sophisticated features if you need them.

Note that the Advanced Search interprets queries in a subtly different way from the Quick Search. If you plan to use the Advanced Search regularly, we recommend that you read the section on Advanced Search syntax and operators to find out more about the search language and how your search is interpreted.

Search within a field

You can search all document information, or search specific fields. The four main search options are:

• Anywhere in text
• Title
• Author
• Keywords

You can search just one field or any combination of fields, for example the search illustrated below will find any documents that mention the phrase 'appraisal training' and are by authors with Brown in their name:

Example search for the phrase appraisal training, written by authors named Brown

You can refine your search further by using the language supported by our search engine to search for exact phrases, exclude words that you do not wish to find and words that must be present in the documents returned. We recommend that you read the section on Search syntax and operators to find out more about the search language and how your search is interpreted.

Anywhere in text

This is a 'free text' search option which will search for your word(s) across Author, Title, Publisher, Abstract, Notes, etc. It is useful if you are looking for information for which we do not have keywords (see below), for example: the name of an organisation, the name of a specific idea or theory

Title

Enter search words here if you know the title, or words from the title of the document you require.

Author

Note: We only have Author information for Library resources and CIPD Books available from the Bookstore. If you perform an author search on any other type of resource you are unlikey to retrieve the information you want.

Use this if you know the name of the author of the item you are looking for. The truncation symbol (click on the link for examples of using 'truncation') can be used at the ends of words.

You can type the surname only, for example:

armstrong

Or, you may type the name in the format surname firstname, for example:

armstrong michael

Or, if you only know the author's initial, type the first letter followed by the asterisk truncation symbol:

armstrong m*

To find items by more than one author, just type in all names, separated by the 'and' operator, for example:

torrington and hall

Keywords

This is the main method of carrying out a subject search. It allows you to find items by means of subject terms taken from CIPD's thesaurus of People Management and Development terms.

Keywords are not currently assigned to all resources on the website. We are working towards keywording all resources in future.

Unless you already know a term is a keyword, use the truncation feature to identify appropriate keywords.

If you click on results from the CIPD Library, you will find that as well as giving details of the item, you will also find keywords that you can click on to find other similar items.

Date range restriction

You can refine your search by date:

• by choosing one of the pre-set time periods from the drop down list
• by entering a specific time range within which to search.
  

We recommend using complete years for the best results when searching CIPD Library resources.

Group/Don't group

If you do not like the category-style presentation, you can select the 'Don't group results by category' option at the bottom of the search results to get a more traditional list of results, which you can order by relevance, or by date using the 'Order by' pull-down. This feature can also be useful if you are looking for a specific document, but are not sure which category it belongs to.

Order by

You can specify the order that your results are presented for both categorised and uncategorised results.

Categorised results are always displayed by our pre-set categories but within the categories you can specify how you want your results sorted.

The three sort options are :

• Default
• Relevance
• Date

Default

The default sort option applies to categorised results only and is designed to help you find the best documents to match your search. The sort order is based on the search engine's best guess of what results are most relevant. But in the case of News and other time-critical material more recent documents are displayed before older ones.

Relevance

Ordering search results by relevance means that documents that most closely match your search words will be displayed first. But, unlike in the Default search, News and other time-critical documents are also displayed by how well the contents match your search words.

Date

Ordering search results by date means that recent documents are displayed ahead of older ones.

The types of information of website are diverse; we cover everything from conference seminars to books and web-based factsheets. When ordering results by date, or using the date-restricted search facility you should bear the following in mind:

• Information about events is assigned the date of the event itself - for example a conference programme is assigned the date that the conference starts - you can assume that the information about that conference is fully up-to-date
• Dates for web-based information about books and other 'offline' information resources reflect when the offline resource was published - again you can assume that the web-based information is fully up-to-date
• Some information resources cannot be readily assigned a meaningful date - for example training course information relates to courses that run regularly and new course dates are introduced frequently. In this case we do not assign a date. Any date-based functionality treats these resources as effectively having dates that are in the future - so when you order by date, they will always appear at the top

Search categories

You can choose to restrict your advanced search to any combination of the nine available categories. CIPD members can additionally search library resources, which are sub-categorised into library books, journal articles and company material (see Library Search help).

Un-checking the box adjacent to a category removes that category from your search.

Tip: Use the 'Search all categories' box to check, or uncheck, all categories.

Un-check the categories you do not want to search

Locations

You can choose whether to search either the CIPD website, People Management magazine website or both. Un-check the locations you do not wish to search.

Search syntax and search operators

Simple queries

A simple query uses words and phrases separated by commas.

When a query is entered in mixed case, the search engine finds case-sensitive matches.
Queries entered completely in upper or lower case force the search engine to find all versions of the query terms-mixed, upper, and lower case.

Frequently used options

AND

Selects documents that contain all of the search elements you specify:

computer AND laptop

To search for the word 'and' use double quotes:

Lewis"and" Clark

OR

Selects documents that show evidence of at least one of the search elements you specify:

nation OR region

To search for the word OR, enclose OR in double quotes.

left "or" right

Wild cards

?
Specifies one alphanumeric character.

For example:

c?t

Finds 'cat', 'cot', 'cut', but not 'caught'

*
Specifies zero or more alphanumeric characters.

For example:

c*t

finds 'cat', 'cot', 'cut' as well as 'cart', 'caught', 'court' etc.

See section on wild cards in the In-depth section below for more details.

Searching for Library resources

Our online Library database is the catalogue of the CIPD Library. You can search the database using the Advanced Search facility - there is no longer a separate Library Search function on the site. We recommend that you read the Advanced Search help for advice on how to get the best out of this powerful search tool.

If you prefer, our library staff can do a search for you and send you a reading list by email, fax or post. Call Library Enquiries, 020 8612 6210, Monday to Friday, 9 00 to 5 30 - you'll need to quote your membership number for this service.

Restricting your search to Library resources

To include Library resources in your search, make sure that the 'Library resources' box is ticked - you'll find this in the 'Select categories to search in' on the right side of the screen. To search just for Library resources, make sure that only the 'Library resources' box is ticked. You can also restrict your search to particular types of Library resources by ticking the boxes for Book, Company material or Journal article.

Tip: To restrict your search to just library resources, un-check all the other categories. The quickest way to do this is to un-check 'Search all categories', then check 'Library resources'

Search options

You can use any of the main search options to find Library resources:

• Anywhere in the text
• Title
• Author
• Keywords.

You can also restrict your search by publication date.

And you can change to order in which your search results are presented to you.

You can find more information on how to use these features in the Advanced Search help section.

The results of your search

When your search is processed, you will see a list of the items which match your search terms.

The list tells you:

• the title of the item
• the 'control code' which you need to order the item from us
• the author (if there is one)
• what sort of item it is (book, journal article, company material)
• the publication date.

To see more detail about any item on the list, simply click on the title. In the detailed display, you will see that Authors and Keywords are presented as links - you can click on these to do another search based on that author or keyword.

For books, you will see a summary (abstract), full publications details, and information about how many copies we have in the Library and whether they are currently available for lending. Note that the term 'HOLD' means that the book is for reference only and cannot be loaned.

For journal articles, you will see a full reference and a summary (abstract) of the article.

NOTE: You can't see the full text of Library items on our website. This is because we would be breaking copyright law to make it available online. However, the full text of People Management articles is available on People Management online. And you can order items from us, either as a loan, or as a photocopied article.

Ordering items

Remember that when you place an order, we will need the following information:

• your membership number
• the 'control codes' of the items that you want to order
• your credit/debit card details - the card number, the valid from and expiry dates, the issue number (if there is one), the cardholders name as it appears on the card, and the address where the card is registered
• the address or fax number you want us to send the items to.

Look at our Library FAQs for more information on our lending or photocopying services.