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I am trying to search on MathSciNet for articles which contains $C^*$ in their title (as in $C^*$-algebras) however I can't figure out how to get MathSciNet not to interpret the '*' as a stand in for an arbitrary sequence of characters.

(I am moving this question from MathStackExchange as no one there seemed to have an answer.)

Community
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Nate Ackerman
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  • 'Title contains "c", "algebra" ' may not be the most elegant fix, but it works. – Christian Remling May 21 '15 at 21:05
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    Barr apparently deliberately called his book "*-autonomous categories" to toy with librarians. Modern technology still hasn't caught up! – Chris Heunen May 21 '15 at 22:01
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    The close voters come to bury $C^*$, not to praise it. – Gerry Myerson May 21 '15 at 22:39
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    Did you write to the support-mail address of MathSciNet? Assuming you did not: I think it is in the long run harmful not to ask such things at the proper place. –  May 22 '15 at 15:33
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is something one should ask on the support email of MathSciNet. –  May 23 '15 at 21:42
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    This is clearly a question of interest to research mathematicians (indeed uniquely to research mathematicians). – Tom Church May 24 '15 at 04:32
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    Now, did you write to the support-mail address of MathSciNet? Yes or no. Because if you did not (and for some reason have no intent doing so) it might make sense somebody else does. But it also makes little sense to "spam" them now. So could you please answer this quiet simple question. –  May 24 '15 at 14:15
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    @quid: I have written to tech support and got an answer which works reasonably well for the specific phrase "$C^$-algebras", but not for example, for "$C^$", or "$*$-category". I have asked for clarification for these other cases and (assuming no one else on MO has an answer) will post whatever information I get back. – Nate Ackerman May 24 '15 at 17:34
  • Thanks for the reply. To record this information here could certainly be a service to the community. –  May 24 '15 at 17:37

3 Answers3

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There seem to be some deficiencies in that search interface. They don't use safe HTML encoding to sanitize the input. Try the following "Title":

<script type="math/tex">Something's wrong...

and you get some kind of crash.

It would be nice to have an escape character like \ so that you could write \* to get a *, but I guess in light of the above it's not surprising that there's not.

Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen
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I have emailed technical support at MathSciNet. Unfortunately they do not know how to search for a string containing a *, as * is interpreted as a wild card. However, if you know the word before and after the * then you can use the proximity search tool adjN which is a stand in for at most N-1 words.

For example, searching for "C adj2 algebra" will find "$C^*$-algebra", as well as "l.m.c. algebras".

Nate Ackerman
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MR often encodes the star with \ast. Searching for that in the title gives 4618 hits, not all of which have to do $\mathrm C^\ast$-algebras; searching for C adj2 \ast or C adj6 \ast still gives 1943 (resp. 1973), almost all of which seem relevant.

Francois Ziegler
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