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About RCAAP Content

The RCAAP Portal is the aggregator (meta-repository) that brings together the description (metadata) of documents deposited in various institutional repositories, data repositories and scientific journals in Portugal. The RCAAP Portal retrieves full text to improve search results but does not store any documents.

When you select the title of a document on the RCAAP portal, from the document detail page, you access, whenever possible, its full content in the repository or journal where that document is held. Therefore, if you experience any difficulty viewing or downloading the document, this will be due to the resource in question and not to the RCAAP portal.

In addition to searching Portuguese scientific output, you can also choose to search Brazilian scientific output, which currently comprises several repositories and journals aggregated in OASISbr.

The RCAAP portal attempts to collect only scientific and academic literature whose full text is available in open access. However, some documents may not meet these requirements, meaning they may be under restricted access due to embargoes or may not contain the full text of the document, only the metadata records.

For more information, please consult the list of repositories currently aggregated in the RCAAP directory.

Simple Search

To perform a search on the RCAAP portal homepage (which we call Simple Search), simply enter one or more words (search terms). The default search retrieves records from Portuguese and Brazilian resources. You may choose to search only Portuguese records by pre-selecting the country (available in the advanced search).

When multiple words are entered, only documents containing all of the words entered in the search box will be retrieved. If you wish to search for an exact term, insert it in quotes, for example: "classification of chemical reactions". Use the truncation symbol (*) to return words with the same root. For example, educ* retrieves "educação", "educando", "educar", "education", etc...

The search engine does not make any distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, nor does it consider accents or diacritical marks. Therefore, searching for "Consciência" or "consciencia" will return the same number of documents. To exclude a term from the search, use the - symbol before the word, for example: chemical -reaction. In this case, all documents containing the word "chemical" but not containing the word "reaction" will be displayed.

The search engine ignores common words (da, de, dos, etc.) and isolated characters (a, e, o), terms such as "http" and ".com", as these are rarely meaningful or useful for searching.

Search Tips

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow you to relate words or groups of words, combine multiple terms in a single search expression and narrow or broaden the range of results obtained: AND, +, OR, NOT

Note: Boolean operators must be written in uppercase letters.

AND – Intersection operator (and the + sign)

Returns results where both terms are present and not just one of them. This operator allows you to narrow results.

For example, to search for results containing the terms "Science" and "Information":

Science Information
or
Science AND Information

To search for results that contain the term "Science" and also contain "Information":

+Science Information

OR – Addition operator

This operator should be used when you want to include alternative terms in the search, such as synonyms, terms in another language, acronyms, among others. It retrieves results where any of the terms is present. This operator allows you to expand results.

To search for results containing either "Information Science" or "communication":

"Information Science" OR communication

NOT – Exclusion operator (or the subtraction sign -)

This operator is used to exclude from results documents that contain certain terms. This operator allows you to narrow results.

To search for results containing "economics" but not "Portuguese":

economics NOT Portuguese

Note: A search should not begin with the NOT operator. For example, the following search will return no results: NOT economics

To search for results containing "economics" but not "Portuguese":

economics -Portuguese

Truncation

Represented by the asterisk (*) or question mark (?) symbols, this operator allows you to replace characters at the beginning, middle or end of a word, enabling you to search for variants of certain terms and thus expand the search.

To search for results containing "educação", "education" or "educational":

Educ*

Other symbols # ?

These symbols can be used to retrieve spelling variants.

To search for results containing both "color" and "colour": colo#r

To search for results containing both "woman" and "women": Wom?n

Quotes "..."

Allows you to search for phrases or search expressions, ensuring that the terms appear adjacently.

Example: "Open Access"

Parentheses (…)

Allows you to set the order of execution of the search expression.

Example: (A OR B) AND C ≠ A OR B AND C

Advanced Search (not yet fully available)

With the advanced search you can define a set of criteria prior to your search, increasing its precision and limiting the number of documents you will find.

Results List

The results list displays all records found in your search ordered by relevance in descending order, unless you have changed the display options. From the results list you can refine results, access the original document in the repository where it is deposited, or view more information about the document.

The results list can be refined through the various available filters:

Author – Lists authors based on the number of records in which they are referenced.
Date – Allows you to restrict the display of the record list by date range.
Format – Indicates the document types and their respective number of occurrences in the results list.
Resources – Displays the number of records in each aggregated resource (repositories or scientific journals).
Language – Displays the number of records grouped by language.

To reduce the number of results in your search, you should select one or more items from each filter group (Author, Date, Format, Resource and Language). The results list is updated automatically each time a filter is selected. To remove a filter, simply deselect it.

To obtain complete information about a record, click on its title. To access the full text of the document in the repository where it is deposited, click the "View document" option.

Document Detail

This page presents all available metadata information about the document you have selected. From this page you can view the document in its source repository or select a related document.

The searched records can be exported in formats compatible with the bibliographic reference managers EndNote and BibTex. You can also export to a CSV file. You can also print the details of a record and copy citations according to the following standards: APA, Chicago and MLA.