Quick Tips for Electronic Searching

• Read and use the electronic help for each resource.
  • Not all resources use the same search strategies
  • Boolean symbols differ with the resource
• Use Quotes to match exact phrases
  • Example: "Evidence-based Medicine" will only retrieve documents where those words are located right next to each other.
• Use wild cards to get all word forms, typically an * symbol
  • Example: "systol*" will retrieve "systolic" and "systole"
• Including and excluding words
  • Use + to include words
  • use - to exclude words
• Boolean operators
  • AND  will retrieve ALL specified words although not necessarily next to each other
  • OR will retrieve documents with ANY of the specified words.
  • NOT will retrieve documents which EXCLUDE the specified word

---------  Return  ----------