International Pharmaceutical Abstracts tutorial

Keywords

OvidSP does not map the search term to subject headings in the IPA database. The initial search will therefore be a keyword search.

When a keyword search is performed IPA will look for the exact word or phrase in the title and abstract fields of each record. Keyword searching allows a lot of flexibility. You are not confined to using boolean logic to connect terms and truncation of terms is possible but you do need to consider all synonyms, variant spellings and forms of a word.

If you want to use a subject heading as the term to search you need to to use nbsp   .sh as the expression. For example, to search for the subject of heading of pharmacists use
pharmacists.sh.

Once you have conducted a search using keyword and you view the record of a citation you can click on the subject headings to use them as the basis for another search.