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Life and Health Sciences Research Support: Advanced Search Tips

Advanced Searching Techniques

These advanced search techniques can be used when keyword searching to save time and help you get the best out of your search. They cannot be used with the subject heading indexing -  Click here to view OVID's quick tutorial on special techniques in Medline including MESH headings - recommended.

 

Phrase Searching

 Truncation

 Wildcards

 Wildcards

 Proximity Searching

 Database

 Uses double quotation marks to find an exact phrase
e.g. "physical activity" 

 Searches for the different endings of words
e.g. ulcer* will find ulcer, ulcers, ulcerate, ulceration.

 Replaces 1 character
e.g. wome/an

 Replaces 0 or 1 character
e.g. behaviour/behavior

 Search for terms within a specified number of words
e.g. chronic adj2 pain would find chronic low back pain

 (n denotes number of spaces e.g. adj2, adj5 etc)

ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts)

 

 Yes *          ?                   *                 Near/n

CINAHL Complete
USearch
SPORTDiscus

Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source

  Yes *          ?                   #                   Nn

The Cochrane Library

 

  Yes *          ?                   *                 NEAR/n

Ovid Platform -
AMED, EMBASE, Medline
PsycINFO 

 

 Automatically phrase searches * or $          #                    ?                   adjn

ProQuest Complete Collection (Includes Physical Education Index, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) IBSS, Social Services Abstracts)

 

  Yes *          ? *                Near/n

PubMed (using these techniques will turn off the automatic mapping)

 

  Yes *             Not supported       Not supported         Not supported

Science Direct

 

  Yes *          ?                  *                    W/n

Scopus

 

 Yes *          ?                  *                     W/n

Web of Science

 

 Yes *          ?                  $                 NEAR/n

Need help looking for information?

If  you need help searching for information or using any of the Library's databases
please do contact a member of the Life and Health Sciences Library team. 

You can also try the Library's Information Skills Tutorial.

Combining your search terms

Use AND and OR to combine your search terms.

See the Connecting Terms tab for more information.

Search strategy template