1. Searching by romanization is still the most effective and reliable way to find Chinese-language materials in SearchWorks. Everyone searching for Chinese materials still needs to be familiar with Pinyin romanization rules.

2. Simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese are inter-searchable. For example, using the simplified characters 张爱玲 for an author search, SearchWorks will retrieve records with both 张爱玲 and 張愛玲 as the author.

3. Each Chinese character is indexed as a single word in SearchWorks. No space is needed between characters.

4. For a more precise search, double quotation marks can be used for phrase or term search. For example, “当代中国经济” in the keyword search query, records with exact phrases will be retrieved. 当代“中国经济” as the search query, Term 1 is 中国经济, term 2 is 当代. SearchWorks will retrieve records where "中国经济" appears as a phrase and 当代 appears anywhere in the record. Records with term 1 and term 2 in the same field will be ranked the highest. Please note, when you use double quotation marks “ ”, you have to switch input mode to English. Currently, Chinese-style quotation marks “ ” will not work.

5. For some technical and historical reasons, a small number of characters with variant forms, for example 研 and 硏, 戱 and 戏, 緖 and绪, etc., require extra mapping and are not inter-searchable. Search by romanization if no results or limited results are returned.

6. When Chinese character searches result in a mix of Japanese, Chinese and Korean language records, you can limit the search to Chinese records by selecting Chinese from the language field under “Limit Your Result” on the left.

If you have questions or need assistance with Chinese-language searching in SearchWorks, please contact the Chinese Studies Librarian, Zhaohui Xue or 650-388-8295.