Skip to Main Content

Doctor of Medical Sciences : Tips for Searching in Databases

A subject guide to support students in the Doctor of Medical Sciences (DMS) program at HPU.

Database Video Tutorials by Database Name

Keyword Search Techniques Video

Use the Connectors (Boolean Operators)

Using Multiple Search Terms

Think about it: search engines crawl thousands, maybe even millions and billions, of pages or records trying to match your search term with results. You're going to be absolutely overwhelmed with results if you only enter a single search term. You're also going to find a lot of completely irrelevant stuff.

So how can you improve your chances?  

Come up with multiple search terms and combine them using the options described in the tabs

Combining search terms with AND will:

  • Reduce the number of results
  • Make the search focus more specifically on your topic

    Examples

  • Search for "college student"  = 1.2 billion results 
  • Search for politics = 296 million results

 

  • Search for "college student" AND politics = 43 million results more focused on your topic
  • Search for "college student" AND politics AND "2008 election" = 543,000 more relevant results

Combining search terms with OR will:

  • Expand your search and increase number of results
  • Give your search flexibility to find alternate terms

    Example

  • Search for film  = 601,786 results
  • Search for movie = 199,781 results 
  • Search for film OR movie  = 642,906 results that mention either film or movie, or both

Combining search terms with NOT will:

  • Decrease your search results
  • Increase the relevancy of your results by telling the search to exclude certain terms

    Example

  • Search for "Hunger Games"  = 745 results 
  • Search for "Hunger Games" NOT movie = 487 results

 Search engines do NOT understand phrases, sentences, or questions. So when it does this matching, it searches for each term individually.

If your search terms are more than single worlds, employ quotation marks to show the search engine that you want the terms to be found together. The search will look for exactly what you place in the quotation marks, so be sure there are no mistakes.

Example: 

  • heart failure = 3,600,000
  • "heart failure" = 580,000

Truncation

Truncation is a way of giving your search tool flexibility to find alternate endings for your search term.

Why it's helpful:  Search engines match your terms to results; they will not find an alternate version of your term. Truncation tells the search to match the root of your term and gives it freedom to find whatever endings it can.

Example:

  • pharm* will bring back results for pharmacy, pharmaceutical, pharmaceuticals, pharmacology, pharmacist, pharmacies, pharmacare 

How to do it:  Shorten your search term to its base or root form. Then add a truncation symbol (in the example above it is the asterisk *) to the end of your term. Note: truncation symbols vary by search tool, but the asterisk is the most common one.

Truncation Symbols by adstarkel. Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Advanced Database Searching

PubMed Specific Tutorials