The Advanced Search Function
The ‘Advanced Search’ function is not necessarily for ‘advanced’ users. Advanced Search is a better choice than a Basic Search when you are very clear about what you want to find out. This is the most appropriate function for conducting comprehensive and precise searches to answer a clinical or research question.
The main features of Advanced Search are:
- Works with precisely chosen search terms, keywords, author, title, and/ or journal name (unlike Basic Search, which uses natural language in phrases or strings of words)
- ‘Keyword’ is the default search type in Advanced Search. The other options are 'author', 'title', and 'journal'
- To ensure no results are overlooked, keywords can be chosen with the assistance of the database’s thesaurus (more about subject headings in Section 3
- Truncation, wildcards, and phrases can be used to capture all versions of text words (more about this in Section 3)
- Boolean Operators allow you to select, combine, and/ or exclude specific search terms that you do, or do not, want to appear in your results. Section 3 provides more information about Boolean Operators
- By eliminating unwanted results and increasing the specific nature of your search you are able to obtain a more precise and comprehensive set of results. Section 3 provides information about refining your search to achieve this outcome.
Review the Ovid Help section at the top right of the MEDLINE database and read the section on searching by Keyword, Author, Title, and Journal.
This Ovid tutorial video covers
Mapping in Advanced Search mode.
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Playing time approximately 4 mins.
Activity 2: Using Advanced Search
Try using the Advanced Search function to search for work by a particular author on the Embase database.
You might like to print this instruction page to refer to as you complete the activity.
You want to search for a paper written by an author with the surname ‘Winter’ and the first initial ‘K’.
- Open the Embase database.
- Ensure the radio button ‘Author’ is selected and Type Winter K into the search box. You will see that your search returns many results including authors called Winter who have first names beginning with K, and also those who have second initials
- Rather than searching all of these results separately, click on ‘Search’ in the bar at the top of the page to return to the search box
- Ensure that the ‘Author’ radio button is selected and type ‘winter K$.au’ into the search box. The $ sign is a truncation symbol. Truncation symbols allow you to search all forms of a word. In this search, the $ sign stands for one extra character or no character. It will return Winter K, Winter KA, Winter KB etc. Use it when you don’t know if the author has one or two initials and you don’t know what the second initial is. For more information on truncation symbols see Section 3. In this case, the truncation feature will return all the results by all authors whose first name starts with K and your search will reveal over 400 results
- From the left hand side of the results you can now apply filters to your search, which will help you to locate the paper by Winter that you are looking for
- Try filtering by journal or publication type for example, and see how these filters make your search more specific.
Help