Search Strategies

Truncation: Place an asterisk (*) to end a word at its core, allowing you to retrieve many more documents containing variations of the search term.  Example: replicat** will find replicate, replicates, replication, replicating, etc.  

Phrase Searching: Put quotations marks around two or more words, so that the database looks for those words in that exact order. Examples: "public health" and "prenatal care."

Controlled Vocabulary

Use the terms the database uses to describe what each article is about as search terms. Searching using controlled vocabularies is a great way to get at everything on a topic in a database.