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.
