Nursing Scholarly Writing & Evidence-Based Practice: Search Strategies

Connecting Concepts....

• Join similar ideas or alternate terms with OR enclosed in parentheses: eg: (diet OR nutrition)
• Link different parts of your topic with AND, eg: nutrition AND heart disease
• Exclude concepts with NOT, eg: dementia NOT alzheimer's
• Check out this Boolean Operators cheat sheet from the University of Minnesota

Keywords Are....

• A good way to start a search
• The important concepts of your clinical question in your own words
• Found anywhere in the article (title, author, subject terms, etc)
• Very flexible

Subject Terms....

• Every article or book is tagged with them
• They are specific, technical terms that describe what the article is about
• A good way to find everything on a topic

Truncation....

• Use an asterisk * at the end of a base word to find word variants
• Eg: nurs* will find nurses, nurse, nursing

Quotation Marks....

• Use quotation marks around a keyword phrase when you want to tell the database that those words must appear next to one another
• Eg: "nursing students"

Keyword --or "natural language searching"--is what you do every day when you search Google or another web search engine. When you search a database with keywords you supply, you're testing the waters to get closer to finding the right information.

Pro-tips: Think of keyword searching as stepping-stone for discovering additional keywords that may bring your closer to the most relevant articles on your topic.  Document all keywords you use in addition to highlighting the keywords that found the best, most-accurate information.

Keyword searching is especially powerful when used in combination with other types of search strategies described below.

While keywords are search terms you choose, subject terms are some of the "official" terms that databases use to tag articles in databases. A keyword search about pain management during labor and delivery will turn up additional subject terms (epidural analgesia, for example) that you can and should use in your own search. You can copy these terms into your search, or you can go to CINAHL Headings and do a structured subject search.

Pro-tips: While understanding how to conduct a subject search is valuable, keyword searching will often get you what you need. The point here is not to rely on just one or two keyword searches but rather to have a variety of search strategies up your sleeve! Please contact a librarian for additional assistance in conducting searches effectively!

Trying keyword or subject searching alone can find you quality results, but it's still better to test and document multiple keyword and subject term searches. Additionally, you can even combine these searches. 

For this example, we built a subject heading search on the topic of type 2 diabetes but added in additional keywords (food OR diet OR nutrition) keywords to cast a wider net.

Pro-tip:  If you add keyword synonyms to your search, combine them with the Boolean operator OR to tell the database that you are searching for similar words. It's a good habit to brainstorm synonyms anytime you conduct a keyword search. For example, what are some keywords for epidural? You might come up with "drug therapy", "pain management" or even "pain reduction. In a search, your combination of synonyms would like like this: (epidural OR "pain management" OR "pain reduction")