What advanced search technique do you use in order to search for an exact phrase

In order to conduct a thorough search in a database search engine, you may need to use a combination of operators and search terms.  Researching within databases is an iterative process that is part art and part science.  Use of operators, search terms and keywords results in highly efficient research.

This research guide will help you construct search queries in the following databases:​

  • MEDLINE (Ovid) This link opens in a new window

  • PubMed@Tufts This link opens in a new window

  • Web of Science This link opens in a new window

Searching Techniques 101

What is a Search Operator?

A search operator is a character or string of characters used in a search query to specify the type of actions you would like the database's search engine to perform.

Some of the most universal search operators across different databases are:

Wildcard:     

   A character is used within or at the end of the word to substitute for one character or no characters

Example: colo?r retrieves documents with the words color and colour

Truncation:

   Retrieves any number of characters after the word stem or no characters.

Example: disease$ retrieves documents with the word disease, as well as the diseases, diseased, etc.

Boolean Operators:

  Retrieves searches by combing terms with the use of words AND, NOT, and OR.  OR will help you gather synonyms,  use NOT to eliminate, & AND to require both (or all) factors.

Example: diet OR nutrition, cancer NOT diet, diet AND cancer

ffBound    Phrase:

  Retrieves searches for an exact match of the text with the use of quotation marks around the terms.

Example: "heart disease"

Exclude Terms

To exclude particular terms from your search results, you can "subtract" terms with the following notation:

Ex. Planets -Pluto

This search will yield results containing the word Planets but omit any results with the word Pluto.

Search for a Range

To search for results within a particular date range, you can specify the range with the following notation:

Ex. science fiction 1920..1950

This search will yield results for science fiction between 1920 and 1950.

Search for a Word in a Specific Location

To search for results for a specific word in the body, title, or URL of a website use the following notation:

Ex. inurl: times

This search will yield results for websites that have the word "times" in the URL. To search within the body, use "intext" instead of "inurl." To search within the title, use "intitle" instead of "inurl."

Search for Related Sites

To search for results that are similar to a favored website, you can specify the results with the following notation:

Ex. related:nytimes.com

This search will yield results for websites that are similar to The New York Times. 

There are two different ways to search for phrases in Scopus, a loose phrase or an exact phrase.

  • Using "quotation marks" will search for a loose phrase, where the words appear together in a fixed order. By default, Scopus automatically includes common variant spellings (eg US/UK) and most plural forms in the search. A loose phrase search can include wildcards, eg "wind turbine*" to match "wind turbine" or "wind turbines"; other punctuation is ignored.
  • To search for an exact phrase, use {curly brackets}. This will search only for the exact words as given, ignoring spelling variation or plurals. It will also force matching for punctuation, such as hyphens, which are normally treated as spaces.

"blue bird" = blue bird, blue birds, blue-bird

{blue bird} = blue bird only

Proximity searches

You can also search for words that are used close to each other, without being in an exact phrase, by using the proximity operator W/x. For example, deer W/5 conservation will find "deer conservation", "conservation of deer", "conservation of red deer", etc. The /x element says how many other words will be allowed between the two keywords, in this case five. It doesn't matter what order the words are in when you use W/x. If it is important to have them in a certain order, you can use Pre/x - a search for deer Pre/5 conservation will only returns results that use the word "deer" before the word "conservation".

What method should be used to search for an exact phrase?

Phrase Searching To search for an exact phrase (where the words are in a specific order), type quotation marks around your search terms.

What are some advanced search techniques?

Advanced Search Techniques.
What is Boolean Searching? Most searches will return too many or too few records. ... .
Narrowing Searches. If your search returns too many records, you can narrow your search by adding more search terms. ... .
Broadening Searches. ... .
Proximity, Truncation and Wild Cards..
Use double quotations marks (" ") to search terms as an exact phrase.