Introduction to searching online

The best way to limit a set of search results is to bring in another concept (using the AND operator) that will make your search more specific.  If you have introduced all the concepts you can think of to narrow your search try the following:

• Begin to review your results.  Is there an irrelevant concept appearing frequently that you can exclude using the Boolean NOT?

• Look for an exact phrase.  Advanced Search does not assume a phrase search and will just search for the separate words.  To search as a phrase you must put the phrase within quotation marks or type ADJ (short for adjacent) between your search words e.g. support ADJ stocking or “support stocking”.

• Use limit filters where available to limit your results by the year of publication, age range, gender, language, publication type etc.

There are a number of tips you could try to increase the results if you find that you are not getting many.

• If available, use ‘thesaurus mapping’ to identify a subject heading that will find your search concept, regardless of how it is expressed in an article.  For example both “cardiac arrest” and “heart attack” map to, i.e. are included within the subject heading of, “Myocardial Infarction”.

• If you don’t find a relevant subject heading using thesaurus mapping, use the OR operator to expand your search to include synonyms.

• If you have at least one result that contains the information you need, go into its full record and see which subject headings have been used to describe it.  If there’s one you haven’t used in your search that looks useful, click on it to pull the relevant set of results into your search history.

• Use a truncation symbol to expand your search by looking for different word endings. The truncation symbol in Advanced Search is an asterisk (*).  Searching for nurs* will find results that contain nurse, nursing, nursed, nurses.

• If you are doing a textword search in the title field only, try using the ‘title and abstract’ field, or search across all fields.  Results may not all be relevant, but you will have a greater chance of finding something.