Use this guide to learn about the power of the Full Text Search and how you can use it to run a comprehensive keyword search across all documents in the ISLG collection, including decisions, awards, procedural orders, pleadings, arbitration rules, treaties and other legal instruments.

Understanding the Full Text Search Tool

The Full Text Search Tool is an efficient way to view where keywords appear in any of the documents in the ISLG collection. A variety of filters and parameters can be applied to refine your search.

To refine your search further, you can use the Advanced Filters to narrow down your search results to documents that match specific data relevant to disputes, including arbitrator/counsel information, procedural matters, issues on jurisdiction/merits, damages/interest and more.

To save time, add your search to a research topic to run it again or share it with others at ease.

Navigating the Full Text Search Tool

From the left-hand navigation, select the “Full Text Search” to enter your search term, select a search type and apply any basic filters. Once you have entered your desired information, press “Search”. If you would like to clear all filters and keywords select “Reset” to start again.

Search Types & Linguistic Aids

Configure the search type and linguistic aids to broaden or narrow down your search as needed.

Search Types

By default, you will run a ‘Boolean’ search. With this search type, you can use a combination of keywords and operators to produce more accurate and relevant results, while discarding the unrelated.

Example:

• Searching for: police AND bias will display results that include both “police” and “bias”.
• Searching for: police OR bias will display results that include either “police” or “bias” or both of them together.
• Searching for: police NOT bias will display results that include “police” where the word “bias” is not present.

Setting the search type to ‘All words’ will show results that include all the keywords typed into your search. And if you would like to run a query in “natural language” and disregard words such as “and” and “or” then select “Any Words” as the search type.

Linguistic Aids

To broaden your search results, use the linguistic aids to create a more robust search experience.

• Stemming: By selecting this option, you can remove suffixes from words so that words with the same root match each other. For example, “likelihood” and “likely” can be stemmed to the same root word, “like”.
• Synonyms: By selecting this option, you can include words that are synonyms of the searched term. For example, bias, discrimination or favouritism will all be considered synonyms.
• Fuzzy Typo: Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. For example, a search for “labour” will find “labor”. Fuzzy typo settings do not work on a 1 to 1 ratio, so it is recommended to use values from 2-3 to maintain a balance between broadening search and keeping the results relevant.

Search Results

Once you submit your search, you will see a listing of dispute documents, treaties and arbitration rules that will appear as results. For results with keyword matches, you can select the paragraph/page to view an excerpt of the corresponding number.

Sorting Search Results

When viewing search results, you will be able to sort the documents in four different ways: relevance, document name, newest first, oldest first. 

• Relevance: This is the default option. It provides you with a list of dispute documents, treaties and arbitration rules that fit your search parameters the closest; therefore, this option will most likely offer the best results according to your search criteria.

• Document Name: This can be helpful when you know what case or treaty/rule you may be searching for. This will order the results in alphabetical order based on document name.

• Newest First: This will order the documents in the results based on the key dates. For example, dispute documents with the most recent date of issue or signature will be shown first.
• Oldest First: This will order the documents in the results based on the key dates. For example, dispute documents with the oldest date of issue or signature will be shown first.

Saving searches

In order to save your search term and applied filters, select the “Actions” menu on the grey bar above all of the search results. Once clicked, there will be an option to add the search to the research notepad to run for later use.