Database Shortcuts

 

Database shortcuts

Here are some useful tips to use when searching on one of the medical databases. These tips will elevate your search and help you get relevant results.

Tip 1: Field tags

Specify where the database looks for your terms by either limiting the search to  particular fields or using field label identifiers; for example in Ovid,  you can use the following field label identifier to only find terms that appear in the title or abstract field (text words in Ovid): .ti,ab.

Tip 2: Truncation

Truncation is where you use a symbol, such as an asterisk *,  to represent alternate word endings. For example, typing nurs* would mean that your search would bring back articles containing nurse or nurses but also nursing, nursed, nursery etc.

Using truncation helps broaden your search without you having to type lots of variations of the same word, but be careful when using it to make sure you are not overwhelmed with too many irrelevant papers.

Tip 3: Wildcard

Wildcard symbols  (normally ? or $) stand for zero or one character.  They are useful for picking up American vs UK spellings of words or other word variants.

Examples include the following:

p?ediatric = pediatric or paediatric

 wom?n = woman or women

Tip 4: Adjacency

You can use special commands in databases to specify how close words appear to one another. This is known as proximity or adjacency searching and can aid in increasing the sensitivity of your search.

Some examples below include:

• To search for a distinct phrase of 2 or more words, put it in "quotation marks" to tell  the database to only find articles with those words next to each other, in that order.
• Adj(number)  (Ovid or NHS HDAS platforms)  e.g. acute adj5 "otitis media" will find the term 'acute' within 5 words of "otitis", in any order.
• N(number) (Ebsco platform) e.g. "middle ear" N2 inflam* will find the phrase 'middle ear' within two words of 'inflamed' or 'inflammation' or 'inflammations', in any order.
  
  If you're not sure which command to use, check each database platforms help pages.

 

Tip 5: Subject Headings

A subject heading is like a tag, or a label, that describes what the item (book, article, etc.) is about.

When an item is added to a database, an indexer will decide which topics are covered by the article, and choose several subject headings to apply.

The subject headings used are selected from a standardised list, or thesaurus; this is known as a ‘controlled vocabulary’. This means that all items about a particular subject would be tagged with the same, standard subject heading, regardless of the words and phrases the author used in the title or abstract.

e.g. if you search for nosebleed in the title or abstract. There are 282 articles with the word nosebleed in the title or abstract.

However, if you search for the correct subject heading for nosebleed, which is epistaxis, you obtain far more results.

 

For further support on searching medical databases, contact the clinical librarians at mtw-tr.clinical.librarians@nhs.net  

Welcome to KNOWvember25

Knowledge Mobilisation in the NHS is about enabling healthcare teams, departments, and whole organisations to consider how they are using external evidence and organisational knowledge. It is an active process of sharing, creating and applying evidence and expertise to improve health and social care. Our team have created a series of events to support ‘KNOWvember25’, a national campaign to help staff across the NHS to embed evidence into their everyday practice.

Click below to view the events; some parts of the programme will not go live until the scheduled date, so check back periodically for ongoing tips, hints and advice on Knowledge Mobilisation.