Searching Ovid: Basic Search
Getting the Most out of Your Results
Building an Advanced Search
You can use your search results to begin constructing an advanced search strategy:
- Note down the useful plum-highlighted words (related terms) to use in your keyword searching.
-
Click on the titles of the most relevant results, and note down the relevant subject headings:
For more information on advanced searching using keywords and subject headings in Medline and other Ovid databases, see our Ovid guides.
Running Your search in Other Ovid Databases
You can run your basic search in multiple databases:
-
Click on the Change link above the search bar:
-
Select the database/s you wish to search, then click Run Search.
The search may take a minute or two to load. -
If you have selected multiple databases, you will probably end up with more results. This has an added benefit: clicking on the arrow beside your search line (preferably after limiting to 5 stars) will show you how many results were found in each database. This could help you to choose which database/s would be useful to search using Advanced Search, based on the number of relevant references they contain:
- If you search multiple databases, it is important to de-duplicate your results.
De-duplicating
Before going through a list of results from multiple databases, it is important to remove duplicate references.
-
Click on Deduplicate just below the search strategy:
Deduplicate is present only when more than one database is selected, and is available only for search lines with fewer than 6,000 results. -
On the next screen, click Continue:
-
You can now go through your results without seeing duplicate references:
