Search Tips
Build Your Search Strategy: Create
Optimising your search terms
Your search will be more effective if you think about the way you use your search terms and how you combine them.
See the tabs in this section for more information.
Alternate word endings
Use an asterisk (truncation) to find different word endings.
In our example:
finds neonate, neonates, neonatal, etc.
You can also use truncation to find American and British variations.
Finds operationalize, operationalise, etc.
Take care not to shorten a word too much. It may be better to use two words in some cases.
is better than
(which will give you a lot of extra results including babbling and the Babinski reflex)
We recommend that you don’t use it in Google Scholar either, as it is incompatible with the search algorithm.
Exact phrases
In some cases you need to look for a combination of words as an exact phrase.
Use quotation marks to find phrases:
Some databases will allow you to combine this with the asterisk to cover all variations of your phrase:
Ways Databases Use Language
Databases have two main approaches to use of language for searching. These are keywords and subject headings.
Keywords
Keyword search is a plain language search where you type words directly into the search box. The database looks for your words anywhere in the record – author, title, abstract, etc. Keyword search does not account for the meaning of a word or how relevant it is in the article. Keyword searching is not the same as typing a question into Google, so you still need to combine your terms using the techniques described in Build Your Search Strategy.
Keyword search works well in: Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane databases, Google Scholar.
Subject headings
Some databases use subject headings to describe what an article is about. These are sets of terms with defined meanings which are used to index articles in particular databases. Their purpose is to make it easier to find articles on particular topics. They are usually arranged in a hierarchy.
The sets of terms used vary in each database, and they can also be laid out differently. This is what they look like in a selection of our databases that use subject headings:
Medline
CINAHL
EMBASE
Subject headings are reviewed periodically but they may not cover the latest concepts, rare conditions or all drug names. For this reason you may want to use a combination of subject headings and keywords in your search.
Subject headings work well in: CINAHL, Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, AMED.