Centralbooks

My Account
Cart
Your Cart is Empty.
- View Cart

Thank you for choosing e-SCRA. We've designed the e-SCRA library to be fast, powerful and easy to use. The e-SCRA library has a very intuitive user interface and relevant, useful information in the search results.

Signing Up

First thing you should do is Register or Sign Up and subscribe to the e-SCRA Library:

Go to Register/ Sign In on the top right of the web page.
Create your user profile: user name, password, email address.
Subscribe to e-SCRA.
1. Email us at info@www.central.com.ph for subscriptions.
2. After signing in, if you are already subscribed you will see new sub menus: Search Library or Browse Library. This means your subscription is active and you are ready to use the e-Library. Otherwise you will need to contact CentralBooks to subscribe.

e-SCRA

There are two ways to get to the information you are looking for:

1. Search Mode
2. Browse Mode

e-SCRA

1. Search Mode allows you to search through Philippine Reports Annotated Volumes 1 to 110, Supreme Court Reports Annotated Volumes 1 to the Present, as well as Advanced Decisions. Search Mode gives you two options:

a. Simple Search, search the title of the case, the parties involved, the docket number or simple search terms.

e-SCRA

b. Advanced Search. We offer Intelligent Filters allowing users to make powerful searches. These tools can help you narrow down your search and save time. (We have prepared a separate document on advanced search terms you can use: Advanced Terms)

e-SCRA

2. Browse Mode is very much like browsing through a physical library. You can browse the library via Year, Volume and you can drill down to a specific case or annotation.

e-SCRA

Search Results

The Search Results window gives you a quick overview of the cases that contain hits related to your search. Without having to open the case itself, you can see at a glance the excerpts of the case where the hits occur, the relevant front matter of the case as found in the PRA or SCRA, including the syllabi. Click on "More Excerpts" to see more excerpts with search term hits in a particular case.

We have made the front matter of a case available in the search results so that you have as much relevant information. Click on "More" to view more front matter information.

e-SCRA

Viewing Decisions in CentralBooks Reader with TrueCite technology.

We give you as much information up front so that you can decide which case you are looking for, upon seeing the case of interest, just click on "View Case" and a new window "CentralBooks Reader" will pop open.

Viewing cases in CentralBooks Reader shows you the case with the original page and page formatting as found in PRA and SCRA. You can cite the case and the page and it will correspond to the original case as found in the physical book. You can copy and paste text from here to your word editor. You can also use our Copy/Paste function, using this method automatically adds a case and page citation after the pasted text, once again making citing a case easy and quick.

e-SCRA

View Scanned Original Decisions

While we've spent many years digitizing the library, there is no library that is perfect or error free from the start. We will be editing and proofing the library continuously fixing errors and updating it online on a weekly basis. But to make sure you have the necessary tools in front of you we have added a feature called View Scanned Original. When viewing some cases in Reader, if you suspect that some of the text may contain possible errors you can look for the button View Original Case, clicking on this will open another window with the original scanned page. The resolution was kept low to keep the system as fast as possible but with enough clarity for you to view the original page. This should confirm whether the text compares with the original. Once again, this is a temporary measure and we will be proofing and editing the library on a daily and weekly basis. Some cases will not have the View Original Case option. This means the case has been fully proofed and edited by our Editors.

Support

We hope you enjoy using e-SCRA, we hope that it makes research faster, easier in a very powerful way. If you need support you can contact us the following ways:

Call: 372-3550 loc. 27 / +639959411910 / 09497285862

E-Mail: info@www.central.com.ph

We would also love to hear from you for comments and suggestions on how we can make improvements to our system and service.
info@www.central.com.ph

Search Engine User's Guide/ Advanced Terms (close)

Terms and Operators

A query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases.

A Single Term is a single word such as "test" or "hello".

A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "Charles Dickens".

Term Modifiers

Advanced Search supports modifying query terms to provide a wide range of searching options. Wildcard Searches Advanced Search supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).

To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.

To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.

The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search: te?t

Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search: test*

You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term. te*t

Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

Fuzzy Searches

Advanced search supports fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word Term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search:

roam~

This search will find terms like foam and roams.

An additional (optional) parameter can specify the required similarity. The value is between 0 and 1, with a value closer to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be matched. For example:

roam~0.8

Proximity Searches

Advanced search supports finding words are a within a specific distance away. To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Phrase. For example to search for a "apache" and "jakarta" within 10 words of each other in a document use the search:

"jakarta apache"~10

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. Advanced Search supports AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as Boolean operators(Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS)

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. This is equivalent to a union using sets. The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR.

To search for documents that contain either "charles dickens" or just "dickens" use the query:

"charles dickens" dickens

"charles dickens" OR dickens

AND

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. This is equivalent to an intersection using sets. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND.

To search for documents that contain "charles dickens" and "oliver twist" use the query:

"charles dickens" AND "oliver twist"

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single document.

To search for documents that must contain "dickens" and may contain "charles" use the query:

+dickens charles

NOT

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. This is equivalent to a difference using sets. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.

To search for documents that contain "charles dickens" but not "charles darwin" use the query:

"charles dickens" NOT "charles darwin"

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

NOT "charles darwin"

The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol.

To search for documents that contain "charles dickens" but not "oliver twist" use the query:

"charles dickens" -"oliver twist"

Grouping

Advanced search supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query.

To search for either "dickens" or "darwin" and "charles" use the query:

(dickens OR darwin) AND charles

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure you that website must exist and either term dickens or darwin may exist.