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Keyword Searching
- Enter your search terms in the box provided
- AND - to narrow your search e.g. aspirin AND ulcer will find records with both keywords
- OR - to widen your search e.g. aspirin OR paracetamol will find records with at least one of the keywords
- Click on the magnifying glass search icon.
Truncation and Wildcards
- Use * to truncate e.g arter* retrieves artery, arteries, arterial etc.
- You can truncate at either end of a word or in the middle e.g. *depress* will find depression, depressive, depressed etc as well as antidepressants
- Some alternative spellings are automatically searched e.g. tumor will also find tumour but to be certain of finding them use internal truncation e.g. isch*mic will find ischaemic or ischemic.
- Use ? to match a single character within a word: wom?n will return women and women.
Phrase searching
- Insert a phrase within quotation marks to create an exact match e.g. "diabetes care", otherwise the words will be searched as diabetes AND care which will give many irrelevant results.
- Phrase searching does not support the use of wildcards or truncation
Apostrophes, hyphens and plurals
- Hyphens and apostrophes are treated as valid characters e.g "burkitt's lymphoma"
- Plurals are automatically searched, so searching for child will also find children.
Proximity searching
- NEAR can be used instead of AND to narrow your search to within 6 words of each other.
- e.g. breast NEAR cancer will find the two words within 6 words of each other in either order.
- NEAR/n will find words within n words of each other e.g. NEAR/4
