Literature Searching: Search Tips

Truncating your term will look for variations in word endings, for example:

• child* will also find child's, children, childrens, childish, childlike, childhood
• fall* will also find falls, falling

Wildcards allow you to search for spelling variations, for example:

• In 'Find It', ? is used to replace a single character, so wom?n will find woman or women
• # is used to replace one or more characters, so p#ediatric will find pediatric as well as paediatric

Enclosing your terms in quotation marks will search for the exact words next to each other in the order entered, for example:

• "older adults"
• "fear of falling"

Proximity enables you to specify that 2 words should be near to each other or a certain distance from each other, for example:

• in 'Find It', lung N3 cancer will find the word lung within 3 words of the word cancer, so will find lung cancer as well as cancer of the lung.
• Fall* N2 risk will find the word fall/falls/falling within 2 words of the word risk, so will find falls risk or risk of falling.
• in the Cochrane Library, lung NEAR/3 cancer or fall* NEAR/2 risk has the same function.

Hint: each database has it's own way of proximity searching, so check the online help before you start searching.