Library Guides: Nursing, Midwifery and Health Promotion: 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 - go to our MeSH guide for more information on this type of searching.

	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 PLUS USearch SPORTDiscus	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

Search Strategy Template