This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website
Advanced search
The advanced search is very useful when you want to run a search based on specific criteria.
The link to the advanced search page is available at the top of every EUR-Lex page, just under the quick search.
The advanced search form offers a variety of criteria to select before launching your search.
To limit your search to specific types of documents like treaties, legal acts or preparatory documents, click the Collection box and choose a category.
The search form adapts to the selected category by displaying specific search criteria. When you press the search button, the system will only search documents that belong to the selected category of acts.
To run a search within several categories of act click Choose multiple collections and make your selection.
On top of the page, you can limit your search by ticking one of the checkboxes. The available options depend on the selected collection.
The following sections give details on the search criteria you can use when you select the collection All documents, which is displayed by default in the advanced search form.
Text search
The Text search box gives a lot of possibilities as regards the keywords to search.
In the first field, type a word, a number or a sequence of words and/or numbers. By default, the two checkboxes ‘in title’ and ‘in text’ are ticked. This means that the system will search your keywords in both the titles and the texts of the documents. If you want to search only in the titles, then untick ‘in text’. And if you want to search only in the texts of the documents and not in their titles, then untick ‘in title’.
If needed, EUR-Lex lets you fill in a second field and link it to the first one with the operators ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’.
For example, we can search for documents that have ‘environment’ in their title and ‘transport’ in their text.
Or, we can look for documents that have ‘environment’ in their title, but not ‘transport’.
Document reference
The Document reference box allows you to limit the search to a date, a specific document number and/or specific types of documents.
The types of documents available in the box depend on the selected collection on top of the search form. If you need more options, click the plus button.
Author
The search criteria of the Author box are useful when you want to limit your search to documents produced by a specific institution, body, entity, country, etc.
If you don’t find the author you are looking for in the Author drop-down menu, click the plus button in the box Other for more options.
Search by date
In the Search by date box, you can select one of the dates that characterize the document(s) you are looking for. For instance, the date when the document was adopted or published in the Official Journal, or the date when the document will take effect. If you do not want to select a specific type of date, choose All dates.
You can also indicate a specific date (day/month/year; month/year or year only) or a range of dates.
Published in the Official Journal
The search criteria of the Published in the Official Journal box let you limit your search to documents published in some editions of the Official Journal of the European Union.
You can restrict your search to a specific year, a specific OJ series or a specific edition of the Official Journal if you know its number. You can even run a search based on the page number of an Official Journal in which a document starts.
EUR-lex also allows you to run searches that are limited to a special edition of the Official Journal.
Theme
Use the Theme box to run searches about a specific topic.
The topics available in the advanced search form are the EuroVoc thesaurus topics. They are divided into 21 domains and 127 sub-domains.
To choose a topic, click the plus button in the EuroVoc thesaurus box.
Then, select one or several topics. In the example below, the search will return documents related to the topics ‘geophysical environment’ and ‘wildlife’.
To make sure that your search results will include the documents belonging to the subtopics related to the topics you have selected, tick the box Include sub-levels of selected narrow terms.
Documents related to a legislative procedure
In the Documents related to a legislative procedure box, you can build a search query that will limit the search to documents related to a specific type of procedure (for instance an ordinary legislative procedure or a non-legislative procedure) and, if you wish, to a precise year.
You can also limit the search to the documents related to a specific procedure by typing its number (for instance 2005/0042/COD) in the Number field.
Show only documents available in
The Show only documents available in box allows you to limit the search to documents published in one or several languages.
For example, if you select ‘Spanish’, the system will search for all the documents that have been published in Spanish.
If you are using EUR-Lex in another language than the one you have selected in the Show only documents available in box, your search will return documents that have been published in the selected language, but you will see them in the language of your interface.
In the example above, we have selected ‘Spanish’ while the user interface is English. The system will return documents that have been published in Spanish but will show them in the results list in English.
Depending on the collection you have chosen at the top of the advanced search form, there may be a few more search options available. If you have any doubts on how to use them, please hover over the question marks to get short explanations.
