Skip to Main Content

HCAD 3370 Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Search Strategies - Keywords and Subjects

BOOLEAN OPERATORS 

The three words that you can use to combine your search keywords most efficiently are: and, or, and not. Take a look at the image below to get a sense of how they work. 

  • AND tends to narrow searches because all words must be included in results.
  • OR tends to broaden searches because one or other terms (or all) can be present in results.
  • NOT selectively eliminates any results containing a specified word.

This image illustrates the effects of different boolean search operator examples: typing coffee and beans as keywords shows content with both words included, typing in party or celebration shows content with either word or both included, and typing in royal not caribbean will show content with the word royal but exclude content with the word caribbean in search results. Additionally three symbols are highlighted: using quotation marks to type in a search phrase like a book title will show results that contain that exact phrase, using parentheses to enclose a phrase works similarly to mathematics and the search engine will perform the boolean search surrounded by parentheses first; and lastly typing in part of a word and adding an asterisk will return all possible spelling variations in your search results.

This super cute graphic comes from this site: Boolean Search graphic from Muck Rack.

Two symbols you can also use to further refine your search keywords are "quotation marks" and the asterisk *.

"Quotation marks" searches for groups of words together. This works best if you are looking for a title or phrase.

Some databases or library resources use parentheses () to group words instead, or in cases of complex searches, to tell the search engine which elements to process first.

The asterisk * is usually found above the number eight on most keyboards. Use the asterisk * to abbreviate words so you can find all possible spelling variations in your search results. It will also make your search results increase, typically.

Keyword Searching for Research Method

You can use a keyword to help you find sources by their research method! This will save you time that you might otherwise spend skimming entire articles looking for the research method.

Subject headings are specific terms that are linked to articles in databases and function at times like tags or categories. In library jargon terms, they are also described as controlled vocabulary. You can find subject headings in databases typically in the article display, or search in the CINAHL Headings. You can combine subject headings using CINAHL Headings using the same connecting words.

This image shows an article entry in CINAHL focusing on the Major and Minor subjects assigned to the article.

CINAHL and MeSH subject headings are similar but not the same!

  • Medical Subject Headings or MeSH, which is the National Library of Medicine's (PubMed, Medline) controlled vocabulary thesaurus. Each article in PubMed or Medline is associated with a set of MeSH terms that are assigned to describe the content of an article.
     
  • CINAHL Subject Headings are based on MeSH (though are not identical) and native to the CINAHL database. Each article in the database is associated with a set of CINAHL subject terms that are assigned to describe the content of an article.