Searching the Evidence

Question 1

Why is it important to find alternate words or synonyms to the major concepts of our topics we are searching

Answer 1

because there may be other valuable information to our research that we may not find because another author used different terminology. so searching synonyms helps find additional information on the subject

Question 2

What does adding the Boolean Logic words, AND, OR and NOT do for our searches

Answer 2

AND - will only find articles that have both terms
OR - will find articles that have either of the terms individually or articles with both terms
NOT - will find any article that includes the first term and doesn’t include the second term

Question 3

Boolean Logic example
Dental Caries AND Oral Hygiene
Dental Caries OR Oral Hygiene
Dental Caries NOT oral Hygiene

Answer 3

AND = every article containing BOTH dental caries and hygeine
OR = every article containing dental caries and every article containing oral hygiene (including those articles containing both)
NOT = every article containing dental caries that doesn't contain oral hygiene

Question 4

when searching, what boolean logic term do you use when connecting synonyms, and what boolean logic do you use when connects different concepts in a question

Answer 4

OR is used between synonyms

And is used between concepts

Question 5

What is the difference between and keyword search and a controlled vocabulary search

Answer 5

a keyword search is a literal search that looks for the occurrence of the word
a controlled vocabulary word search uses a set of phrases to describe concept (MeSH, Embase)

Question 6

What is MeSH

Answer 6

Medical Subject Headings

a form of searching important in the health sciences with a hierarchical list of terms

Question 7

What is the truncation search technique and what is its symbol

Answer 7

truncation is symbolized with an , and searches for multiple endings to a term
ex: Floss searches Flossing, Flossed, Flosses, ETC

Question 8

What is an adjacency search technique

Answer 8

oral* adj10 cancer*

this will only search for articles in which oral and cancer are within 10 words of each other.

Question 9

What do quotations do in a search “oral cancer”

Answer 9

it looks for the exact phrase inside of the quotations

Question 10

What are parenthases used for in a search

Answer 10

nesting OR’d terms