Library
Search Tips
The following tips will help you refine your internet searches to
best ensure your results are relevant.
Be specific
Start your search by being as specific as possible and choose your
keywords carefully. If you don't retrieve any articles, you can try a
more general search term.
For example: "hernia" rather than "inguinal hernia"
Generally it works best to start from specific rather than general and
then move out as needed.
Work from most relevant articles
If you begin with, or find, an article exactly on your topic, it's worth
searching for other articles written by the same author, using author
search. Another possibility is to locate the article on MEDLINE, check
the keywords used to describe it, and use those keywords to search with
(adding any date or subject limitations you have).
Search for phrases
When looking for a specific phrase, enter the words in quotation marks.
This will instruct the search engine to find the phrase exactly as you
keyed it in, rather than the words individually. This is particularly
useful when looking for names - such as an organisation or a
disease.
For example: "Royal Australasian College of Surgeons"
Boolean operators
Use Boolean searching to narrow or broaden your search as required:
AND - used in a search to instruct the search engine
to include both words in the results.
For example: conferences AND medical
OR - this expands your search by telling the search
engine either term is acceptable.
For example: "Royal Australasian College of Surgeons" OR RACS
NOT - use NOT when there are terms you would like to
exclude from your results.
For example: diabetes NOT children
Truncation
Truncate searches to ensure you are finding all variations of a word.
Most search engines use the asterisk (*) as the truncation symbol.
For example: entering the search term respir* will find sites containing
the words respiration, respire, respiratory etc.
Spelling variations
Be aware of spelling variations.
For example: if looking for information on orthopaedics search for
orthopaedics OR orthopedics
These tips are based on searches using Google, though the
principles can be applied to any search engine. It is important to
remember that each search engine works differently and uses different
criteria in searching. No search engine has the entire web indexed and
you will get quite different results depending on which site you have
used.
Useful sites for further tips
Last Modified: 5 January 2009
© Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. All rights reserved.
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