How does ScienceDirect transform my search inputs?

ScienceDirect search uses stemming to show more relevant results. This means the search terms are reduced to their root form and only then the search is matched to possible results.

The reasoning is to provide a better chance of retrieving relevant documents for a given search input. The search is finetuned to also show results that might have been missed out due to spelling variants, plural forms, grammatical inflections such as -ing, and so on. For example, a search for color will return results containing color, colours, colorization, etc. The approach is based on language heuristics.

ScienceDirect's query interpretation may occasionally produce unexpected results. For example, heating and heat are treated as different word roots by ScienceDirect even though the terms have a semantic connection. The number of results will differ for each of these searches. To search for  heating and/or heat, the boolean operators AND and OR can be used in combination with both terms.

If you are not able to find what you are looking for using ScienceDirect search, try using exact search (using "double quotes") or Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to refine your query input.