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Using a few simple search techniques can sometimes dramatically improve your search results
When you're ready to bring it all together and construct your search, see compiling a search strategy (this link opens a different guide in a new tab).
Once you have defined your search terms, use Boolean operators (AND and OR) to combine your search terms together.
Use OR to combine different synonyms for the same subject, so that results which contain any of those synonyms are retrieved:
teenager OR adolescent OR "young person"
Use AND to combine different subjects, to ensure you only retrieve results where both subjects are covered:
teenager AND "social media"
Use NOT with caution. For example, if you searched for teenager NOT adult, you would not retrieve any results which talk about adults, but you would also not retrieve papers that discuss both teenagers and adults..
Often you might want to use a combination of search operators to construct a search. In this case, you need to keep your concepts grouped together using parentheses (brackets) to ensure the search is carried out correctly:
(teenager OR adolescent OR "young person") AND ("social media" OR facebook OR twitter)
Truncation is a technique which can broaden your search, where your search term has a common root but multiple possible endings. Correctly using truncation can help you to search more efficiently as it saves time.
Type the root of the word, followed by the truncation symbol to search for different possible endings of the word. Most databases use the asterisk as the truncation symbol.
Psycholog* will find:
Psychology
Psychologist
Psychological
Be careful not to truncate too early as you may retrieve irrelevant results:
Psych* will also find:
Psychiatry
Psyche
Psychic
When searching for a phrase, it's a good idea to put the phrase in quotation marks:
"social media"
fake news about coronavirus is circulating via social media
This will ensure that the words are searched next to each other, as a phrase.
Without the quotation marks, often databases will carry out the search as if you had combined them with AND, for example social AND media. This means the words might not be found next to each other:
social media
media reports suggest that people are adhering to social distancing
IMPORTANT: Some databases will search for two words next to each other as a phrase by default. Notably, this is how searches on the Ovid platform are carried out. For NHS trusts, this includes databases such as MEDLINE and EMBASE. Always check the help pages for the database you are using to ensure you understand how your search is carried out.
Make sure you type quotation marks into the search box, don't copy and paste from Word or the Web.
Subject headings are similar to tags or hashtags. They describe the topic of an item in a database.
However, unlike tags they come from an official, standardised set of terms and are assigned by experts.
The index of subject headings is usually called the Thesaurus.
Many resources have their own list of subject headings, or thesaurus. For example, the database MEDLINE has a thesaurus called MeSH (Medical Subject Headings).
