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TRIP: Searching

User guide for TRIP

Searching TRIP

TRIP will open to the simple search box

  • Enter your first search term (e.g. diabetes), or synonyms for your first concept using OR , or multiple concepts using AND connectors, and click Search.
  • ***technically AND is not required as TRIP defaults and automatically inserts AND
  • TRIP supports other simple Boolean connectors. Use OR to find articles which use any or several of your search terms, or to combine terms that are similar.
    This will increase the number of articles found e.g. iron OR Fe.

    

Truncation and phrase searching

Advanced searching techniques can also be used:

When searching using keywords, databases will usually only find the exact term you enter and not any plurals or variations. In order to make sure that all variants of a term are retrieved a technique called truncation can be used:

  • Truncation - placing a * at the natural end of a word (the stem) will find all variations

            e.g. metabol* will find metabolic/s, metabolism/s, metabolite/s, metabolone/s, metabolome/s, metabolically, metabolonics, metabolised,  metabolized etc.

             

 

Phrase searching

Phrase Searching narrows your search results by allowing you to define precisely how you want the words to appear.

By placing double quotation marks around terms will search for it as an exact phrase

            e.g. “malignant hypertension"

Notes for TRIP

The European spelling of a medical term e.g. haemorrhage, should also pick up the American English spelling e.g. hemorrhage.