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Nursing: Medical Literature Search Strategies

Medical Literature Search Strategies

Literature Search Tips

Truncation

Use to find alternate endings of a word, or to find the plural form of a word. Many databases use an asterisk as a wildcard.

Example: Nutrition* = finds nutrition, nutritional, nutritionally, nutritionist, nutritionists 

Boolean Operators

Most databases recognize the use of Boolean Operators, and it is usually recommended that you capitalize AND, OR and NOT for the database to recognize these terms as Boolean Operators.