5 Tips for Better Search Results
- Truncation will increase your results! Use * ? $ !
Each database has its own truncation symbol. Truncating a word will tell the database to search for variations in the suffix of a word. Truncate your search term at the stem of the term – e.g., physiol* will find articles that include the words physiology, physiologic, physiological, etc. Check the help documentation for the database you are searching to see which symbol works. PubMed uses the asterisk (*) after the root of the word. Other databases use ?, $ or! - Use Boolean Operators (AND, OR and NOT) and quoted phrases (“”)
Boolean Operators and quotations marks around phrases will help ensure the database picks up your exact search term and will help eliminate the unrelated results. Quotation marks (“”) force the database to look for your term as a phrase, e.g., “spotted owl” instead of the terms spotted and owl in the same article. - Subject Headings: the backbone of most databases
How would you describe crystallized stones that painfully migrate through the urinary tract? Kidney stones. Kidney calculi. Renal stones. Renal calculi. Subject headings (also called Concept Codes or Descriptors) gathers all variations of common terms under a single heading and helps you focus your search. Often, when searching databases using subject headings, you can limit your search to articles where your subject is the main point of the article. This helps eliminate irrelevant articles from your search. - Don’t forget the Limits!
Limits can help you tailor your search results to a particular date range for publication, study type, animal type, gender, age group, or journal subset. In PubMed, Core Clinical Journals is a popular limit that can help you reduce the number of citations you retrieve and bring forward articles from major medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, etc.) - Look at the Related Articles/Records
Only finding one good article? Try looking at the Related Articles (PubMed) or Related Records (Biosis, Web of Science) feature on the abstract display of the citation. The Related Articles/Records link reconstructs your search use subject headings of the article you are looking at.
<submitted by Rikke Ogawa>
