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Academic Skills in Nursing and Midwifery: Creating a Search Strategy

Searching Tips

1. Break your topic into concepts.
    e.g. The effect of diet on a person's health:  Concept = Diet                Concept = Health

2. Consider alternative keywords:
          diet, nutrition                 health, wellbeing

3.  Use truncation to search for variations of words: infan* (infants, infantile, infancy)    child* (child, children, childhood) 

4.  Use AND to narrow the search:
          diet AND health                                   nurs* AND best practice

5.  Use OR to broaden the search:
          diet OR nutrition                                  child* OR infan* OR toddler

6.  Use inverted comas for phrases:
          " pulmonary embolism"                        " evidence based nursing"

7.  Beware of differences between English and American spelling and terminology (Use both spellings with OR): 

foetal/fetal   caesarean/cesarean     haemorrhage/hemorrhage