Search Tips

Boolean Operators connect your search terms together to either narrow or broaden your set of results. The three main operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

AND: Combining keywords or sets of keywords with AND narrows the search by requiring that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting list.

OR: Using OR between like words, or synonyms, broadens the search as the resulting list can contain any of the keywords.

NOT: Using NOT narrows the search by restricting certain words from shown in the results list.

PHRASE SEARCHING: Quotation marks can be used to search for phrases or groups of words, e.g. "social inequality"     "public health"

TRUNCATION & WILDCARDS: You can use the truncation symbol * to increase keyword retrieval
e.g. epidemiolog* will search all endings of the word after the *, for example epidemiology, epidemiological, epidemiologist

Research Question

Identify the main keywords and concepts from your research question and add these to the table

Use the above table to group all of your like words/synonyms together in a bracket, words separated by OR. Join the brackets together with AND to combine the different concepts together.

Search Statement

This search statement can be copy and pasted into the relevant databases, using each database ‘search tips’ for extra assistance.