Thunderstone Support Forums

Chemical names often have different constructions for the same name. e.g. polylactic acid, poly-lactic acid. How do we set the indexes or eneable the search to capture the following: poly(lactic acid) (there is no space either side of the parens)? It seems that using poly-lactic-acid as the search term does not capture or highlight that construction.

The punctuation, parens in this case, are breaking the phrase binding. You'll need to search for the individual words perhaps with a proximity specification such as "w/2" if you're using withinmode word.

The term is part of a phrase, e.g.: +claim @0 poly-lactic-acid pva w/6. What do you recommend in this case?

You could use * instead of - to maintain the unit binding but allow it to span more.

Because we are searching for a lot of chemicals in multiple search strings we have created equivalence files for all the terms. * and ? do not seem to be interpreted when they are in an equivalence file.

More specifically wildcards are not special in lists of multiple terms but are special in single terms.

Add poly(lactic acid) to your equiv file.