*Available in Dimensions Plus and Analytics only

Dimensions offers the option to search for documents which are similar to an abstract or other longer piece of text (formerly called "abstract search"). Simply select "Similar Documents" on the right side of the search box, paste the text into the search box, and then press ENTER. Dimensions will then extract relevant concepts from the text and return the most similar documents. The similar documents search can be used with all available content types. It is therefore possible to request grants similar to a specific publication abstract, etc.

Abstracts of methods papers or highly technical wording will be likely to bring back a smaller number of results which are highly related in scope to the entered abstract. Using a review paper abstract or less technical piece of text is likely to lead to a greater number of more general results.

This type of search can be extremely useful when trying to identify publications or grant funding based on a specific topic which would otherwise be hard to define through complex keyword searches alone.

Text used in the "Similar Documents" search remains private to you and is neither uploaded nor stored in any way in the Dimensions database.

Changing the number of results and applying filters

The search for similar documents relies on complex weighted combinations of automatically identified noun phrases to identify highly similar documents, and due to the complex processing required for this, the results shown for this kind of search are limited.

By default, Dimensions returns up to 500 most similar documents. You can change this threshold manually to 1,000 or 2,000 documents using the dropdown at the top of the search results list. When applying additional filters, such as a research organization or a year range, Dimensions will recalculate the results and return a new set of similar documents up to the selected threshold - but this time within the body of documents meeting the criteria of the search and applied filters.