MeSH is the controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles. Using a combination of MeSH terms and keywords is a great way to comprehensively search the literature.
Be sure to use quotation marks around any phrases that contain two of more words, such as “maternal health” – PubMed may search each term individually and look for maternal AND health. This could potentially yield search results out of scope and irrelevant to your research question.
OR – expands similar search (use OR when stringing together similar concepts and ideas, synonyms, etc.)
AND – combines different searches (use AND when stringing together different concepts and ideas)
NOT – limits your search (use NOT when you want to limit your search and to exclude certain keywords)
These are to the left of search results and may help narrow down your search by selecting filters for age, sex, study design/methodology, etc.
You can review the MeSH terms indexed in articles that match your criteria and make sure you have not missed any important MeSH terms or keywords that are relevant to your research question. MeSH terms are located towards the bottom of the article's record in PubMed.
Look through the Similar Articles or Cited By to find additional papers that may have similar keywords, MeSH terms, or topics that pertain to your research question. The Cited By feature could help you find newer research that is citing the article you are looking at.
The Advanced Search gives you more options and fields to use to create a more precise search with all relevant keywords and search terms.
The PICO search form allows you to build searches using the PICO (Patient, Intervention, Comparison/Control, Outcome) framework. You can browse Emtree directly on the search page and apply the best Emtree term, along with synonyms, to each of the different elements in the PICO framework. Emtree is the controlled vocabulary of Embase.
Use either the single (') or double (") quotation mark to search for phrases and keywords.
OR – expands similar search (use OR when stringing together similar concepts and ideas, synonyms, etc.)
AND – combines different searches (use AND when stringing together different concepts and ideas)
NOT - limits your search (use NOT when you want to limit your search and to exclude certain keywords)
These are to the left of search results and may help narrow down your search by selecting filters for age, sex, study design/methodology, etc. A popular filter to use in Embase is the Sources filter, which allows you to filter out literature and articles that overlap with PubMed.
Use the designated field tags for a more precise search. For example, using the field tag TS=, tells Web of Science that you want to search the Topic field for your keywords or phrases. Searching for TS=("community health") will tell Web of Science that you want to search for "community health" in the Topic field, which searches the title, abstract, author provided keywords and keywords plus for that exact phrase. You can build your search using field tags in the Advanced Search.
OR – expands similar search (use OR when stringing together similar concepts and ideas, synonyms, etc.)
AND – combines different searches (use AND when stringing together different concepts and ideas)
NOT - limits your search (use NOT when you want to limit your search and to exclude certain keywords)
These are to the left of search results and may help narrow down your search by selecting filters for age, sex, study design/methodology, etc. Some interesting filters available in Web of Science that you may want to use include Affiliations (where the authors work, practice, are afiiliated with, etc.), Funding Agencies (what organizations are funding the research), and more.
You can review the author provided keywords in articles that match your criteria and make sure you have not missed any important keywords that are relevant to your research question. These keywords are hyperlinked so they can be explored further and located underneath the abstract of the article.
Look through the Similar Articles or Cited By to find additional papers that may have similar keywords or topics that pertain to your research question. The Cited By feature could help you find newer research that is citing the article you are looking at. Web of Science also includes bibliometric data that could be useful and show you the impact and reach of a particular article or publication.