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Post Graduate Health & Nursing: Searching

Resources and information for Health and Nursing students undertaking postgraduate study

Keywords

 

Keywords are Key 

When searching for literature you need to use the main concept terms (i.e. keywords), not the whole question. 

This focuses your search to the terms you actually need.

Once you have decided on the main terms/concepts you'll be searching with, you need to think up the synonyms or any alternative words/names these concept terms could otherwise be known as within a piece of literature e.g. elderly, geriatric, aged.

This helps you to cast your net widely and retrieve all the relevant resources for your topic; different authors, eras, databases, and countries, might use a different term to mean the same thing and your concept may have terms that are closely related to it that would be useful to search.

Example:

Effectiveness of social media interventions on the healthy eating behaviours of teenagers.

Keywords Synonyms / Alternative words
Social media  internet community | social network | interactive media | digital media | Facebook | TikTok | Instagram | YouTube
Intervention promotion | advice | health promotion | health education 
healthy eating  diet | food | food choice | eating habits | nutrition |
Behaviour conduct | habit | action | attitude | perception
Teenagers adolescent | youth 
Effectiveness outcome | impact | benefit | advantage | success | efficacy | ineffective | barrier | disadvantage

 

When searching, play around with your keywords, try different combinations, omissions, additions and techniques.

Controlled Vocabulary

 
A controlled vocabulary (also called subject headings or thesaurus) is specific list of terms used by a database to organise them in a standard manner so that the same term is always used to describe a particular thing that could have alternative descriptions, so even if different authors used a different term or spelling, they should still be “tagged” under the same term in the database. e.g. Adolescent for youth or teenager. 
 
This is useful as it can help you to:
  • Find all terms in a particular database related to your topic.
  • Standardise the keywords you use.
  • Find additional search terms.
Be aware:
 
  • Different databases may use different subject headings – e.g MeSH or the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®
  • Not all terms will have a subject heading related or assigned yet and sometimes there may be a common usage term that can also apply to that concept, therefore, you will find it useful to use both natural language/free text keywords AND subject headings

For example, if we were searching the above terms in a database that used MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) the MeSH version of our terms would be:

Keywords MeSH
Social Media Social Media
Intervention Internet-Based Intervention | Health Promotion | Health Education
Eating Eating | Diet, Healthy
Behaviour Behavior | Adolescent Behavior
Teenagers Adolescent
Effectiveness n/a

Boolean Operators

Boolean Operators is a fancy Librarian term for the use of AND OR NOT in a search.  Boolean operators are an important tool to help you to broaden and/or narrow your search.

AND OR NOT

AND -> Narrows your search (this AND that)

 

OR -> Expands your search (this OR this)

 

NOT -> Narrows your search (this NOT that)

 

OR  Goes between similar terms to expand your search to ensure you capture all possible records Jaguar OR Cougar
AND 

 

 Goes between the different concepts to narrow your search to items with both concepts.

 Wolf OR fox
NOT 

 

 Helps exclude terms that might use the same word but have different meanings.

 For example, if you want information on big cats, you could use “Jaguar NOT Cars”. Use NOT sparingly, only when it is obvious and is sufficiently different in meaning otherwise you can cut out lots of relevant material too.

 Cars

 

(Note:  it is good practice to always use CAPITAL LETTERS for the Boolean operators as many databases rely on this for it to work as intended)

 

When using a database that has multiple search lines within its "advanced search" (highly recommended) it is useful to keep all the terms from one concept together on the one line, going across and separating them with OR, then use a new line for AND.  If you are searching something like Google Scholar that only has the one search bar, you can separate your concepts with ( ).  

So, our search terms above could look like:

  social media OR internet community OR social network OR interactive media OR digital media OR Facebook OR TikTok OR Instagram OR YouTube
AND  
  intervention OR internet-based intervention OR therapy OR treatment
AND   
  eating OR diet OR food choice OR eating habits
AND  
  behaviour OR behavior OR adolescent behavior OR conduct OR habit OR action OR attitude OR perception
AND  
  teenagers OR adolescent OR youth
AND  
  effectiveness OR outcome OR impact OR benefit OR advantage OR success OR efficacy OR ineffective OR barrier OR disadvantage

 

Searching Techniques & Tips

Phrase searching

 "  "

Phrase searching is when we put "quotation marks" around a term of 2+ words so that the database searches it as a single phrase, it helps to narrow and focus your results.

e.g. "Social Media" searches for these two words as if they were one, but if we didn't use " " it would search for Social AND Media

Truncation

*

We can use an asterisk* for words that could have multiple relevant endings, this helps to broaden your search without having to put all the different possibilities in.  e.g. 

Behav* will search for:  Behavior, Behaviour, Behavioral, Behaviorally, Behaviorism, Behaviorist, Behave, Behaved, Behaving

Wildcard 

?

 Some databases allow you to put a ? in instead of a variable character e.g. wom?n

Proximity 

ADJ#

 The use/abbreviation for proximity searches can vary across databases, but in Ovid Medline for example, you can use ADJ to show that you would like the terms to be near each other e.g. Food ADJ3 choice would retrieve records where the words food and choice are listed within 3 words of each other.  

For a list of different operators for some of our databases see Table 1 from this article:

 

Bramer, W. M., de Jonge, G. B., Rethlefsen, M. L., Mast, F., & Kleijnen, J. (2018). A systematic approach to searching: an efficient and complete method to develop literature searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 106(4), 531–541. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2018.283

Field Tags

Field tag options in Library Search (Title, Author/creator, Subject, ISBN)

Field tag options in Library Search

When you are using and advanced search, you will usually see the option to select a search field.  This allows you to search within different/specific parts of a document, e.g. title, author, abstract, keywords (some specialised databases such as Medline have a long list of options).

In most cases you can just keep to the default, which is often title, abstract, keyword, however, if you are searching for a specific author, or wanting to systematically tighten your search parameters, you may want to limit your search as such. However, title, abstract and keyword are often used in systematic searches as it helps to keep your search focussed, theoretically, if an article is relevant to your subject, your terms will be included somewhere within the title, the abstract, or they keywords the author/publisher have assigned to it.

Subject headings / Controlled Vocabulary / thesaurus

When doing a systematic search you will also want to find and separately search and subject headings that are associated with the concepts in your search.  You can then utilise these different field tags to add them into your search e.g. in PubMed it could look like:

Internet-Based Intervention[MeSH Terms] OR intervention[Title/Abstract] OR therapy[Title/Abstract] OR treatment[Title/Abstract]

 

For a more detailed example of how to utilise field tags in an OVID MEDLINE search string see the box in this guide called: Example of the steps used in a systematic search on Ovid Medline.

 

Filters and Limiters

One of the great advantages of databases over other search engines is that they have complex filters that relate to your subject area and/or academic research.

Common filters you can limit your search results to are:

  • Date (e.g. 2020 - 2025)
  • Peer reviewed journal articles
  • Language.

Different databases have different options, for example EBSCOhost's CINAHL has many subject-specific limiters including, just to name a few:

  • First Author is a Nurse
  • Randomized Controlled Trials
  • Clinical query types
  • inpatients or outpatients
  • Age groups

Putting it all together

Putting it all together, our final search string.

 

("social media" OR "internet community" OR "social network" OR "interactive media" OR "digital media" OR TikTok OR Instagram OR YouTube) AND (intervention OR "internet-based intervention" OR therap* OR treatment) AND (eating OR diet OR food ADJ3 choice OR eat* adj3 habit*) AND (behav* OR "adolescent behavior" OR conduct OR habit OR action OR attitude OR perception) AND (teen* OR adoles* OR youth)