The Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA) allows you to search the full text of each document as well as data about each document (metadata) such as author, title, and date.

By default, DIDA searches the entire record, meaning the full document text as well as the metadata fields.

For more precise results, you can specify a field or fields to search. Read about searching in specific fields below.

Use the operators AND, OR, NOT to combine search terms and refine your search.

Examples:

To find documents in which both terms occur:
gabapentin AND migraine
gabapentin migraine


To find documents in which either term occurs:
gabapentin OR migraine


To find documents in which the term gabapentin does appear and migraine does not appear:
gabapentin NOT migraine

To search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks.

"Neurontin marketing plan" will retrieve all documents containing the phrase "Neurontin marketing plan" anywhere within the document text or metadata.

Search for documents that contain two or more phrases by entering all of the phrases:
"Neurontin marketing plan," "marketing strategy," "marketing materials."

To find documents that contain at least one of several phrases, separate the phrases with OR: "marketing plan" OR "marketing strategy" OR "marketing materials."

Search for information in specific fields instead of in the entire record by using field codes. DIDA supports searches of any combination of document text and fields.

See a list of all fields and their codes.

The simplest fielded query would be one specifying a single field, such as the title field as follows:

Example -
(Field code:search_term)
ti:migraine

Note that no space appears between the field code, colon, and search term.

To look for two or more different terms in the same field, enclose them in parentheses or list them separately:

ti:(Neurontin OR gabapentin)
ti:Neurontin OR ti:gabapentin

Combine searches in the same or in different fields using AND, OR, NOT.

ca:Parke-Davis AND ti:gabapentin
ti:gabapentin NOT dt:article
ti:nicotine NOT dt:article
ti:(Neurontin OR gabapentin) AND dt:(press release OR advertisement)

Restrict a search to documents dated within a certain timeframe by specifying a date range in the document date (dd:) field.

Search syntax: dd:[yyyymmdd TO yyyymmdd]

Example:
dd:[19950132 TO 19971231]

Wildcards
Wildcards can stand in for one or more unknown letters or numbers.

Use the single character wildcard "?" to search for variant spellings.
For example, organi?ation would find organisation and organization.

Use the multiple character wildcard "*" (asterisk) to find several variations of a term.
Example: epilep* would find epilepsy, epileptic, and epileptics.

Please note that overly broad wildcard searches will result in an error message.

Proximity search
Proximity searches find terms that appear near each other. To do a proximity search use "~" at the end of a quoted phrase followed by a number indicating within how many words of each other terms should be.

Example: "Neurontin migraine"~10 would find "Neurontin" and "migraine" within 10 words of each other.

Proximity searches are useful in full text searching when terms can appear pages apart from each other.

• When searching for a drug, use both brand and generic names.
• Using the wildcard symbol (*) to search for Bates Numbers before and after a specific document's Bates Number may find related documents - i.e. bn:x023684*

Too many results? Focus your search by...

• adding a word or phrase


• specifying the order in which you want words to appear with proximity operators


• using a more specific term or phrase


• limiting the query to a specific field or fields


• limiting the query by date

Too few results? Broaden your search by...

• removing a word or phrase


• not searching for exact phrases


• trying synonyms or variant word forms


• searching in the entire document


• removing date range limitations