Web of Science: Advanced Search Features

Planning your Search In this guide we are trying to find articles which will help answer the following question:

Have there been any trials in the last 3 years that have looked at the benefits of HRT for menopausal women who may develop osteoarthritis?

Before starting your search you should ask questions of yourself such as: -

What are the keywords? - Are there any other ways to spell the keywords? - Are there any other words which mean the same thing (synonyms)? - Are there any related keywords I want to include? - What limits do I want to apply – date, language, age group, publication type?

In this search there are 4 sets of keywords: Have there been any trials in the last 3 years that have looked at the benefits of HRT for menopausal women who may develop osteoarthritis? Our plan for the search looks like this:

Our plan for the search looks like this:

1. HRT
2. osteoarthritis
3. menopausal
4. trial

There is a variety of techniques we can use to make the search much more comprehensive and efficient: 

Boolean Logic -OR will search for articles containing any of the terms we choose. Use OR to combine synonyms, alterative spellings or related items AND will search for articles which contain all of the terms we have chosen.

We can expand those keywords into collections of synonyms. You may want to broaden your search to include plurals, grammatical variations and spelling variations, so you can use TRUNCATION or WILDCARDS.

Truncation / Wildcards The asterisk (*) represents any group of characters, including no character (eg: s*food will find seafood and soyfood)

The question mark (?) represents any single character (eg wom?n will find women and woman).

Phrase Searching: use " " To search for an exact phrase, enter it in quotes, e.g. “endometrial cancer”

You can also use combinations of these wildcard tools to get the broadest possible variation: eg organi?ation* will find organisation, organization, organisations, organizations, organizational, organisational.

Recognise the key phrases in your search – this will help you improve the relevance of your search results: searching for hormone replacement therapy might retrieve papers which use all the words, but not necessarily in this phrase.

Our plan for the search now looks like this:

HRT OR “hormone replacement therap*” OR “oestrogen replacement therap*” OR “estrogen replacement therap*” AND osteoarthriti* OR osteoporo* OR “bone mineral densit*” AND menopaus* OR post*menopaus* OR "post menopaus*" AND trial* OR RCT

To put this into practice and actually find the relevant papers, follow these steps:

Type hrt in the first search box, and click “add another field” Type “hormone replacement therap*” in the 2nd search box and repeat, adding the remaining terms into each box, remembering to combine with OR Click “search”.

You may be alarmed at the number of hits you get for this first layer of your search. Don’t worry – once all the terms are combined, the number of hits you have to look through will be much more realistic.

Return to the search screen and click the 'clear' option beneath the previous search terms. Enter all the terms for your 2nd keyword - one per box, combining all the terms with OR. Click “search”

Repeat this process with the remaining terms. Click on the Menu icon at the top left of the screen to 'View your search history' 

All lines of your search are now presented, one line for each concept,  and these can be combined using AND. 

First click on  Advanced Search as highlighted above.

Tick each line that you want to be represented in your search (ie tick all these boxes in this search) Select "combine sets" and choose 'AND.

You will see that the searches have been combined, click on Search and the results will now be reduced in number and will be more relevant.

Why use AND? You use AND to combine search terms where you want ALL the words to appear in the articles that are found.

The number of hits has reduced significantly: this set of hits will contain papers that are relevant to your question, finding articles that include the topics  HRT, menopause, osteoporosis and trials.  

You can also used the Advanced Search screen to build your search by entering key terms for a concept on the add to query box and it will display in the query preview to show you the structure of the search.  Search by any of the fields, in this example 'topic' and the query preview will add the appropriate field tag TS.  See bottom right for all of the field tag options.

See advanced searching on your subject guide for more help with searching also on LHS Research Support guide.