How do I change the sort order of search results?
Last updated on August 05, 2025
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In Engineering Village you can specify how your results will be sorted before you submit the search. You may also change the sort order of your search results after you submit your search.
Relevance (from most to least relevant) is the default sort method. You may change this sort default on the ‘Results’ tab of the ‘My preferences’opens in new tab/window page.
- From the ‘Sort by’ tab located beneath the search text box on the Expert search page, select one of the following radio buttons:
- Date (Newest)
- Relevance
- Conduct an Expert search query. Your search results are sorted on the Document results list in the manner you selected.
- Conduct a Quick or Expert search query. The Document results are displayed.
- From the ‘Sort by:’ dropdown menu on the right side of the Document results list, select one of the following sort orders:
- Relevance
- Date (Newest or Oldest)
- Author (A-Z or Z-A)
- Source (A-Z or Z-A)
- Publisher (A-Z or Z-A)
- Cited by Patents (Least or Most)
- Only available for the Patents Plus databases
- The Document results list refreshes with your results sorted in the manner you selected.
Important sort order points:
- Records sorted by date will be sorted first by a four-digit publication year (YYYY - e.g., 2026) or eight-digit publication sort date that includes the year, month, and day (YYYYMMDD - e.g., 20251101) and then by an internal weekly load number.
- Records from Compendex, PaperChem, Chimica, GEOBASE, and Inspec (front file) sort dates based on year, month, day format.
- Records from CBNB, GeoRef, Knovel, NTIS, and Patents Plus sort dates based on the 4-digit year format.
- Relevance ‘direction’ cannot be changed.
- Records that do not contain author names will be placed after records that contain author names if Author (A-Z) is used as the sort for the Author field.
- Records not containing publisher information will be placed after those containing publishers if Publisher (A-Z) is used as the sort.
- In addition to changing the sort order of your search results, you can change the sort order of the output appearing on the Selected records page.
- Some sorting methods are not available for every database. Thus, the sorting methods appearing in the Results list dropdown differ according to your selected databases.
- For example, if you have selected Compendex only, you can sort by ‘Relevance,’ ‘Date,’ ‘Author,’ ‘Source,’ or ‘Publisher.’ If you have selected all databases to which your institution subscribes to run your search query, you may be able to sort only by ‘Relevance’ or ‘Date.’
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