Search tips

It is good practice to search for the terms for each concept separately so that you can try combining them in different ways in the Search History of the database.

This has the advantage of enabling you to see the number of search results each concept gets, which might help you to refine your search terms. Boolean operators allow you to build your search up term by term, and then combine these terms in a variety of different ways, depending on how useful the results are.  We will say more about this in the section on refining your search.

There are some useful features you can use when searching:

• Truncation – This usually uses the symbol asterisk *. You can use it at the end of a search term. This allows you to search for all possible endings, e.g. therap* will find therapy, therapies, therapeutic etc.; diet* will find diet, diets, dietary, etc.
• Proximity searching using ADJn, NEAR, NEXT – These work best when searching closely related words that you would expect in a paragraph, e.g. therap* NEAR diet*
• Wildcards – This usually uses the question mark symbol ? It replaces a letter within a word, e.g. an?esthesia will retrieve anaesthesia and anesthesia.

Note – The symbols used for wildcards and truncation vary between different databases and search tools. You should check the help pages for each database to see what they support before starting your search. For instance, Google (as one of the main search engines) doesn’t support truncation with an asterisk – it does this automatically (using stemming algorithms), however asterisks can be used in Google as wildcards.