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List search is different from the other kinds of search in that its primary purpose is not to locate individual bibliographical items; instead, as its name indicates, it creates lists of terms appearing in certain fields under certain conditions. You could, for example, use it to list all the composers whose music was published in Leipzig between 1830 and 1849, except those published by Hofmeister: this would translate into 'List all composers where Publication place is Leipzig, except where publisher is Hofmeister', together with the appropriate date ranges. There is no facility for listing titles, as such searches are better carried out using Advanced search Thesauri are available for all fields other than Title and Registration number, and only thesaurus searching is available for Key (click on the 'Thesaurus' icon). For the remaining fields (Publication place, Publisher, Country, Class, and Registration number) it is possible to search by either using the thesaurus or typing in your search terms.

For textual input, searching is neither case nor accent sensitive (thus 'marsche' will find 'Märsche'), and wildcard characters (?, *) may be used: ? substitutes for a single character, while * substitutes for any number of characters. Other non-alphanumerical characters (e.g. ', +, -) are ignored. For cyrillic entries it is possible to paste cyrillic characters into the search box, but it is more reliable to use the thesaurus when searching for composers, and transliterations for titles (the system adopted is that used in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians). Results may be limited to a specified range of months and years: to select just one year, enter it in the 'From' field and leave 'To' blank. If the 'Month' field is not filled in, the whole of the relevant year will be searched.

You can sort the results by one key (Date, Opus, Publisher, Publication place, or Country; note that sorting does not use thesauri but is based on what is in the actual entries). You may also specify the maximum total of results to be returned, and the maximum number of results to be displayed per page; be careful of choosing 'All' if there is likely to be a very large number of results. If you have set the maximum number of results per page, use the 'Next' button to see more results, or choose a specific range. In addition to the listing of items in the specified field (e.g. composers), the results will give the number of matches, and you can view the individual bibliographic items represented by these matches, in the same format as the results from Basic, Advanced, and Free text searches.

It is important to be aware of inherent limitations in the use of matches to generate statistical information. In addition to the general problems in using Hofmeister XIX as a source of statistics, as explained in the Help Introduction, it is necessary to understand how List search handles composite items (albums and works in parts): if there is a match in any of the individual bibliographic items contained with an album or work in parts, then all individual items contained with it will be retrieved and included in the number of matches, whether those individual items match or not. As always, care must be taken when using Hofmeister XIX as a source of statistical data.