Search Tips for the Health Sciences

1. Identify the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) associated with your topic . You can do this inside the library”s MEDLINE or CINAHL databases by using their browse features or you can explore your topic in the National Library of Medicine MeSH Browser.

2. When you are searching the literature in MEDLINE and CINAHL, it is important to search for each topic separately and then combine them. You can expand your Search History to see the sets you have created in both MEDLINE and CINAHL. You will also locate the buttons near the Search History to combine the sets.

3. Select the Explode option if it is available when browsing and selecting a Subject Heading. Selecting this option will broaden your retrieval. This is especially true if you are combining and applying limits to fit the parameters of your research.

4. Consider using keywords combined with Subjects or in addition to a Subject search. You can truncate words to search variations, for instance: diagnos$.tw. in MEDLINE and diagnos* in CINAHL.

Please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably. Use the Ask A Librarian link at the top of  the right hand column.