Biomedical Sciences

Use boolean operators to make your search more effective.

Quotation marks find phrases instead of individual words ("social media").

AND finds records with all of your terms/keywords and narrows your search ("media streaming" AND covid-19).

OR finds records with any of the terms and broadens your search (youth OR teen OR adolescent).

Truncation finds records with a term's various endings (nurs* = nurse, nursing, nursed, nurses, nursing's).

Zero Results

• first check your spelling :). And don't forget that British (labour) and American (labor) spelling might effect your search results
• try using a term that might be more inclusive. For example, if your search yields no results for "quadriceps tendinopathy" , then try tendinopathy. You could use the OR operator to also. This example could look something like: "quadriceps tendinopathy" OR tendinopathy OR tendinitis. Alternatively, you could use truncation and try tendin* as well

Too Few Results

• Revise your research question and check it is not too specific
• Expand your search by using truncation and OR to add synonyms for your search terms (ie. baby OR babies OR infant* OR toddler*), (heart OR cardiac) 
• Include different spellings (paediatric, pediatric) and both scientific and popular names (cannabis, marijuana)
• Search using both subject headings and keywords
• search for articles listed in the bibliographies at the end of relevant articles that you do find
• perform an Author field search for the names of relevant authors who are listed in these bibliographies
• click on Find Similar Results (Ebsco databases) or Find more documents like this (Proquest) from the full record page of a relevant article

Too Many Results

• You may have to revise your research question to make it more specific, for example add a setting or population
• if your search yields too many results (ie. diabetes), use AND to make it more specific (ie. diabetes AND therapy AND adult), or use "quotation marks" to search for phrases
• search for your terms in the Title field (from the pull-down menu on the search box)
• use database-specific proper Subject headings
• use more limiters (ie. date range, publication type, special interest groupings, document type, journal title, etc.

Non-relevant Results

• use proper subject headings. For example, instead of streaming, try "streaming media" or "streaming services"
• find a relevant article in your list of results, and use its proper subject headings to redo your search
• use the Subject limiter to focus on particular subjects of study

I've got three great articles, but nothing else!

• Continue building on your search
• Turn to subject specific databases or Google Scholar to find cited by and related articles
• Check the reference lists of your great articles for other relevant articles
• Check the subject headings on your great articles and search using them