A Q U A P H Y T E


 A NEWSLETTER ABOUT AQUATIC, WETLAND AND INVASIVE PLANTS


Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants V
 with support from FLORIDA
 The Florida Department of Environmental Protection,
 Bureau of Invasive Plant Management A Extension
 The St. Johns River Water Management District IFAS Extension


Volume 27 Number 1 Fall 2007 Gainesville, Florida ISSN 0893-7702
New Search I Modify Search I About | Contact Search Strategies | Contribute


APIRS Database
Aquatic Plant Information Retrieval System
http://plants.ifas.ufl.edu/APIRS
 The Aquatic Plant Information Retrieval System (APIRS),
now with more than 67,000 bibliographic citations, continues to be
the largest free database of its kind in the world. Used regularly by
researchers, government agencies, companies, teachers, students
and private groups and individuals, users can request searches of
the database or they can access the database themselves online.
APIRS is supported by the Florida Department of Environmental
Protection, Bureau of Invasive Plant Management.
 The APIRS database was moved to a new system programmed-
by a senior computer science student at the University of Florida,
Mr. Dmytro Martynyuk. The system now runs on MySQL with
php as an interface, allowing for greater flexibility and stability
than before.
 Features of the new system include an optional Log In that en-
ables users to tag and email citations, a date modifier field, faster
data entry, online editing capabilities, and a far less expensive
system to maintain.
 To tag and email citations, users simply login before searching
the database (nothing is required except a password and an email
address). Any citations of interest may then be selected and sent
to Tag Records, where you may accumulate or delete citations
before sending them to your own email address. See Tagging
Help under Search Strategies for more information (only avail-
able when you log in).
 Note: Logging in is not required in order to search the APIRS
database. It is only required for tagging citations.
 Search operators for the APIRS database have changed and are
listed below:
Search All Fields
 = Truncation operator. An asterisk (*) appended to a
word will find that word plus any additional letters; for example:
sediment* will return records on sediments, sedimentation, sedi-
mentary, etc.
 + = AND Operator. A leading plus sign (+) indicates that the
word or words must be present in each citation that is returned.
There is no space between the operator and the search term; for
example, +hydrilla +smith


 = NOT Operator. A leading minus sign (-) indicates that
the word must not be present in any of the citations that are re-
turned; for example, smith* -hydrilla will return citations contain-
ing smith, but not those containing hydrilla.
 = OR operator. When neither + nor is specified, the default
is OR; for example, smith* hydrilla* returns citations that contain
either word.
 = Exact phrase operator. A phrase that is enclosed with-
in quotation marks matches only citations that contain the exact
phrase; for example, "chemical control"
 () = Subexpression operator. Parentheses group words into
subexpressions; these can be nested. For example: +acid +(rain*
precip* depositi) finds acid rain or acid precipitation or acid-
deposition.
 To restrict your search results by date, choose one of the modi-
fiers from the Date modifier field (<, >, =), and enter a date, com-
bined with your search term in Search All Fields.
 To search for a single publication year, enter the year into the
Date field under the list of individual fields (see below).
 +hydrilla smith finds citations that contain the word "hydril-
la", but ranks citations higher if they also contain Snniit ".
 + = BUT NOT operator. +wetland -construct* finds cita-
tions that contain "wetland" but not "constructed wetlands".
Search Individual Fields
 To search a specific field (for example, Title, Author, Date,
etc.), type a single word into an individual field. Individual field
searches do not support the above listed operators, multiple search
terms, or multiple fields; use a single word in a single field only
(for example: Vallisneria in the Title field).
Advanced Search Examples
 Following are examples of advanced search strings for search-
ing the APIRS database. These have been compiled based on
many years of experience using the database. Search examples
are in bold:
 For acid rain, use the following keywords to be sure you are
not missing the publications that refer to acid rain as acid precipi-
tation or acid deposition: +acid +(rain* precip* depositi)
 For carbon-14, search: ("c-14" "c14" "14-c" "14c" "carbon-
14*" radio* radio-label*) (+carbon* +isotop*)
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