Training and Information Skills

There are millions of records in the databases.   For example,  PubMed has over 38 million citations,  Medline has over 31 million,   CINAHL has over 4 million records,   and so the search techniques have been developed to make it easier for you to search and to find the relevant results. 

Subject Headings

Subject Headings are terms with a defined meaning and describe a subject regardless of the words or terms used by the author. - They are sometimes called controlled vocabulary or dictionary terms and they officially describe a condition, treatment, therapy, speciality etc.  

For a systematic search, it is recommended that each concept is searched by subject heading and keywords or free text.  

Phrase Searching

Depending on the platform you are using to search the database, sometimes the database will search two terms as a phrase, but if you are unsure, you can use quotation marks. 

This is especially useful if searching a phrase which includes a stop word like "and"  

for example "health and safety" 

AND     OR       NOT

are the three Boolean Operators that can be used when searching any database. 

OR   Expands, so use it during the search to find all records associated with a concept . 

AND  Narrows,  so use it at the end to combine results of the different parts of your search together, or when combining different concepts.

NOT - be very careful when using NOT as you can eliminate relevant records inadvertently. 

Truncation

Searching using truncation means using a symbol to replace a letter or letters at the end of a word, allows you to broaden the search.  It is very useful, but be aware that using it can retrieve unwanted words.

See examples here 

 Proximity or Adjacency Operators

Searching using proximity or adjacency means using a symbol to find the search terms

• next to
• near to 
• within a certain number of words of each other in the results.

Allows you to to a broader search. 

Databases may have different proximity or adjacency symbols depending on the platform used. 

For example:

• Ovid uses ADJ as the symbol for adjacency. 
• EBSCO uses two operators N (Near)  and W (within)
• PubMed uses a tilde sign. ~
• Cochrane uses two operators  Near and Next

You can combine search techniques when searching any database. 

Phrase searching with truncation - "music therap*"

Phrase searching with truncation and brackets ("music* therap*" OR "music* intervention") AND anxiety

See more examples here

A short list of search terms used when searching databases - both on the Ebsco Platform and on the Ovid Platform.