International Pharmaceutical Abstracts tutorial

Search strategy

Introduction

No database, regardless of how extensive it is, how much it cost, or any other consideration, is of any use if the strategy you use for searching it is essentially flawed.
For this reason it's in your best interests to understand the essential elements of conducting a comprehensive search.

Define your topic

Take a minute to mentally map what you need to do.
Be as precise as possible.
Decide on the keyword(s) or phrase(s) that sums up the information you want.
Use subject encyclopedias and dictionaries to help you clarify your topic and give you ideas for keywords.
Note synonyms and related terms.
Note American spellings e.g. colour/color.
Note plurals e.g. child/children.
Note acronyms and abbreviations e.g. NSAID/nonsteroid antiinflammatory drug.

Define the scope of your topic

Do you want material only published within a certain time scale e.g. within the last five years?
Do you want a specific author?
Can you narrow your search to a particular field? E.g. a specific drug term?

The important point here is to be as precise as possible.

Separate the concepts

One of the general problems everyone has in their first searches is understanding that concepts need to be searched individually. That is, use Boolean logic to expand or combine two or more different concepts.

For example:

Searching for the effective use of nonsteroid antiinflammatory agents.
NSAID or nonsteroid antiinflammatory agent are synonyms of the same thing. These two terms constitute one concept.
Effectiveness (and any various synonyms of effectiveness) constitutes another, separate concept.
You would need to search for both separately (NSAID OR nonsteroid antiinflammatory agent) and (effectiveness).
When each concept is considered separately they can then be combined: (NSAID OR nonsteroid antiinflammatory agent) AND (effectiveness OR drug efficacy OR treatment effectiveness).

As an addendum to this note that some concepts (or synonyms) can be both individual words, phrases or acronyms.

Boolean logic

Boolean AND

AND will retrieve documents that must contain both search terms A and B. Obviously AND will narrow your search results.

Boolean OR

OR will retrieve documents where any of the terms appear. Either or both terms will appear in each paper retrieved thus expanding the search results.

Boolean NOT

NOT will exclude one element. NOT should be used with caution because it may eliminate items of interest. But NOT can be used safely to exclude results already displayed from previous searches.

Truncation

Truncation is useful to find a root word plus all the words made by adding letters to the end of it. When a term is truncated, a symbol replaces a letter or letters to the right of the symbol.

The EMBASE symbol for truncation is: ! (an exclamation mark). For example:
behav! would find behave, behaviour, behavioural.

Truncation is most useful when you know clearly what word endings you need but don't require the space to write them all. Don't use truncation as a guess about possible alternative you haven't considered or it can throw you search quite off course.

Wildcards

Use wildcards (in EMBASE an asterisk *) to replace characters anywhere in a word, except the first character. Use one asterisk for each letter or character you want to replace. For example:
wom*n would find woman, women.

Use the asterisk to hold a space for variations in spelling at any point in a word. For example:
bernst**n would find both the ei and the ie spelling of the name.

Adjacency

W/nn is used to find two or more terms in close proximity to each other. n equals the number of words between the terms.

E.g. The system interprets the periods in initials as blank spaces. A name may be given with or without middle initials. To find articles by Raymond Smith, Raymond J. Smith and Raymond J. A. Smith use a proximity connector: raymond W/3 smith

E.g. pharmacist W/5 relationship will find instances of the terms within 5 words (or less) of each other in either direction. This would retrieve documents with phrases such as:

"pharmacist patient relationship"
"patient pharmacist relationship"
"relationship of the pharmacist to the patient"

Stop words

Stop words are common, frequently used words. These words are not searchable and must be omitted from your search string.

Stop words include:
Most articles (the, an, etc.)
Personal pronouns (he, she, we, they, etc.)
Most forms of the verb, "to be" (be, is, was, etc.)
Some conjunctions (as, because, if, when, etc.)

The words, and, not or or, are not considered stop words - they are Boolean terms. Avoid using them except when you intend to use Boolean logic.

The words, in and a, are common words, but they are not stop words. To search for a phrase containing these words, enter the entire phrase as your search request. (For example, when searching for the phrase, "one in a million", enter your search string as one in a million). If you are not sure whether a word is a stop word, omit the word and use something else.

Refining your search

Once you have done your search you may find you have retrieved too many, too few or irrelevant references.

Too many

Combine (AND) even more keywords to make your search more specific.
Limit the searching by field. e.g. only the title or specific Drug Index Term.

Too few

Search for even more synonyms (OR) or related terms.
Use truncation to find more relevant terms.
Use a wildcard for variable characters within a keyword.

Irrelevant

Go back and redefine your topic more precisely.
Perhaps the keyword you have used has more than one meaning.


	Pharmacy subject guide

	Embase

	Tutorials - IPA

		Search strategies

		The IPA environment

		IPA records and results


		Keywords

	Medline

	Handouts

	Class material