A search strategy is how you "talk" to a database to tell it what you want to find information about.
Search strategies can be customized depending on your information need. You can use various techniques to combine your search terms and to broaden or narrow your results.
For your PICOT question search, you will create 3 different search strategies representing the 3 most important parts of the PICOT: the P, I, and O.
Read below for details and examples of search strategy techniques. These include:
Boolean logic is a fundamental database search technique.
Boolean operators AND, OR, or NOT allow you to logically combine search terms to retrieve optimal results.
AND will narrow your search by retrieving results with all of the search terms entered. It is helpful when linking two or more different concepts together.
cancer AND fatigue AND exercise
OR will broaden your search by retrieving results with any of the search terms entered. It is helpful when finding information on a variety of synonyms or related terms.
empathy OR compassion OR sympathy
NOT will exclude results from your search and is used rarely (exercise caution when using NOT, as it can eliminate relevant results)
dementia NOT Alzheimer's
Truncation, or stemming, is a helpful keyword search technique to avoid the need to type in several variations of a search term that has multiple word endings.
By placing an asterisk * after the root of a word, you will find results with multiple word endings.
nurs* will find nurse, nurses, or nursing
anesth* will find anesthesia, anesthesiology, anesthetist, or anesthesiologist
elder* will find elder, elders, or elderly
Important note: In some cases, truncation might not be as helpful and you may need to enter all word variations. For example, if you are searching for literature on the aging population, and you are interested in retrieving results with the word aging OR aged, truncating ag* would retrieve a lot of unrelated results including agriculture, agoraphobia, and others! In that case, it makes sense to do a Boolean search for aging OR aged.
Use of quotes around words, sometimes called phrase searching, will retrieve results with those exact words in that exact order. For example:
"evidence-based nursing practice"
"mindfulness-based stress reduction"
"animal-assisted therapy"
Important note: Do not use quotes around single words. Only use them around phrases of two or more words.
The use of parentheses will group desired search terms together in combination with appropriate Boolean operators in a single search box. It is helpful when relating different sets of search terms together into a single search string.
For example:
(dementia OR "Alzheimer* disease") AND ("fall prevention" OR "fall risk assessment")
This search will find results on either dementia or Alzheimer's disease AND either fall prevention or fall risk assessment