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Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities

Help for Database Searching

Library Tips for Searching

  1. Formulate the question: Typically, a focused research question will consist of a disease of interest or health problem or an intervention or exposure.
  2. Identify databases: select all relevant databases or sources of studies that seem appropriate for your topic, check all sources including reference lists.
  3. Run literature search: Split the questions into concepts and their synonyms then combine your concepts to create a search string to run in the databases. 
  4. Filter search results: Identify appropriate search results, document your search strategy and methods, and save citations.

Combine keywords using Boolean Operators (AND & OR)

  • OR is expansive; good for synonym building with like concepts
    (ex. fruit or apples or oranges or bananas – ANY concepts can be present)
  • AND is restrictive; forces topics to overlap
    (ex. Oranges AND vitamin C – BOTH concepts must be present))

Truncation broadens a search to retrieve items containing various forms of a word. 

For example: model* could retrieve model, modelling, modeling, models etc.

Symbols used may be *, $, ?, or # (Database dependent ...)

Dangers in using truncation? Yes, shortening the word too much may retrieve too many results - for example, rat* could retrieve ration or rationing, while you are hoping to retrieve anything with Rattus).

Can specify words appear close together but further apart than an exact phrase

  • PubMed does NOT have proximity operators
  • Ovid (Medline, PsycInfo)  = adj# 
    Example: peer* adj2 assess* will find peer assessment and also assessed by their peers
  • EBSCO (CINAHL, ERIC) = N#
    Example: peer* N2 assess*

  • May use parentheses to group synonyms – watch for typos!!
    Example: peer* adj2 (evaluat* or assess* or feedback or grad*)