Search Tips:- Before beginning a search try to identify key concepts that define your topic.
- Define these concepts using words and phrases.
- Think of alternative terms or synonyms.
- Avoid words that are too general.
- After performing a search, try limiting your results using the facets in the right column.
- If there is an author you are familiar with, try searching for his or her work. This might point you to other relevant articles on your topic.
- Similarly, if there is a journal that is related to your topic, try browsing its issues to find relevant articles and use their keywords to formulate searches.
Boolean and Proximity Searching:
Use the operators OR, AND, and NOT between words to create more complex queries, e.g. (smoking OR drinking) AND health.
Use the NEAR operator to locate terms that are close to one another or NEAR
/n to locate terms so many words away, e.g. dog NEAR/5 bite will return documents where bite is within 5 words of dog.
Operators can be entered in the text box or from the drop down after adding additional rows.
Phrase Searching:
Surround phrases in quotes e.g. "health care costs".
Truncation and Stemming:
An asterisk * will replace any number of letters within a search term, e.g. jud* will return judge, judges, judicial, judicious, etc.
Also, the terms entered will match any term that shares the word root, e.g. goose will match both goose and geese or run will match run, runs, ran, running.
Refining:
Use the lists of facets that appear to the right of your search results to limit your search to specific keywords, journals, article types or languages.
