How do I perform an Affiliation search?
Last updated on April 02, 2026
Affiliation search provides the ability for the user to search for Compendex records via a listing of the profiles from author's affiliations. These profiles contain the affiliations' preferred names as well as the variant names that have been used for their published documents.
The Affiliation search feature provides a precise method for locating specific institutions and schools by using their names as well as their corresponding cities and countries/regions to locate individual affiliation profiles.
Affiliation searches are performed against the affiliation field from the affiliation profile. This field includes the preferred and variant names as well as the city and country/region names for the affiliation. The Affiliation results display the affiliation's preferred name as well as the most frequently used variant name for which the affiliation has published documents. Thus, the displayed affiliation names in the search results for some records may be different than the terms contained in your search query. In these cases, the search results that are returned matched a variant affiliation name, the affiliation city, or the affiliation country/region from the affiliation profile.
Affiliation searches are not added to your Search history.
Note: Your institution must be subscribed to the Compendex database and Affiliation search must be enabled for your institution to access this feature.
Follow these steps to perform an Affiliation search:
- Click ‘Search’ at the top of any Engineering Village page.
- Scroll down and click ‘Affiliation.’ The Affiliation search form opens.
- From the ‘Affiliation name’ search box, enter an affiliation name, city, or country/region.
- Select ‘Show exact matches only’ if desired. Refer to the ‘Affiliation exact match search’ section of this FAQ for an explanation of affiliation exact names.
- Click the magnifying glass icon to run your search.
The ‘Loading’ message displays, and the Affiliation results appear below the Affiliation search form.
Affiliation search results contain data from the Affiliation index. This index contains affiliation names, affiliation cities, and affiliation countries/regions. Entering affiliation information as listed in the table below will yield the following example search results.
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Affiliation search examples | Entering Wright into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields many variations as the search results contain records in which Wright is a component of the affiliation name or affiliation city. Affiliation name:
Affiliation cities:
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Affiliation search examples | Entering United into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields many variations as the search results contain records in which United is a component of the affiliation name or affiliation country/region. Affiliation name:
Affiliation country/region:
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Affiliation search examples | Enter the names from the affiliation into the ‘Affiliation name’ field in the order for which you want see results. For example, entering Research Institute into the ‘Affiliation name’ field finds affiliation records containing the following search terms:
The following affiliation records are not returned in the results using the previous search query since the search terms are arranged in a different order.
Note: The proximity search feature is not supported for Affiliation searches. |
The affiliation exact match search provides a precise way to search affiliation names by returning results that are exact matches to the name in your search query. For an exact match, the entire affiliation name is indexed as one token. Refer to the examples below.
Identically to regular affiliation searches, exact match affiliation searches are run against the preferred names as well as against the variant names for the affiliation.
Select the ‘Show matches only’ check box to enable this feature.
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Affiliation exact match example | Entering School of Management into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields no variations of this name. All results contain the exact match School of Management.
It is possible that the exact name match (e.g., School of Management) may be contained in the variant name, but not in the preferred name. |
Affiliation exact match example | Entering Medical University into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields no variations of this name. The names from all affiliations in the search results contain the exact terms Medical University and these terms are arranged in this order. It is possible that the exact name match (e.g., Medical University) may appear in the variant name rather than the preferred name.
Note: The proximity search feature is not supported for Affiliation searches. |
Affiliation exact match example | Entering Main University Medical Center yields the search result Main University Medical Center as an exact match. However, entering Main University Medical does not yield this affiliation in the results as this is not an exact match. In this case the term University is missing from this search query.
Note: The proximity search feature is not supported for Affiliation searches. |
Wildcards can be used in conjunction with exact matches for names in the affiliation name, affiliation city, or affiliation country/region. The results from a wildcard search using exact match will contain only names indexed as a single word or token.
Use a question mark (?) to replace a single character anywhere in the name.
Use an asterisk (*) to replace 0 to x number of characters anywhere in the name.
You can use the question mark and asterisk wildcards in the same name. Refer to the examples below.
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Affiliation name wildcard search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is not selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Electrical* engineering into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following affiliations:
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Affiliation name wildcard search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is not selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Sm?th* into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following results as the search terms can be found in the affiliation name, affiliation city, or affiliation country/region. affiliation names:
affiliation cities:
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Affiliation wildcard search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is not selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Forest* into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following results as the search terms can be found in the affiliation name, affiliation city, or affiliation country/region. affiliation names:
affiliation cities:
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Affiliation wildcard search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is not selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Col?m* into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following results as the search terms can be found in the affiliation name, affiliation city, or affiliation country/region. affiliation names:
affiliation cities:
affiliation country/region:
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Affiliation name wildcard search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is not selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Software Technologies* into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following affiliations as these search terms are contained in each of these affiliation names:
‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is selected using this Software Technology search query includes the following affiliation as these two terms are indexed as a single token into the search engine:
An Affiliation wildcard search does not include the following examples as they are not exact matches to the previous search query:
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Affiliation wildcard exact search examples | ‘Affiliation search’ in which exact match is selected displays results as shown in the following examples. Entering Col?m* into the ‘Affiliation name’ field yields the following results as these search terms can be found in the affiliation name, affiliation city, or affiliation country/region fields. For example, this search query finds records with the following exact matches in the affiliation name. affiliation names:
The same search query finds exact matches for records which have the following affiliation cities:
This search query does not find an exact match for the record with affiliation city La Garenne-Colombes as this term is hyphenated and is not indexed in the search engine as a single token. This search query finds the following affiliation country/region as it is an exact match since it is indexed in the search engine as a single token. affiliation country/region:
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