2. NEXT, design your advanced search to use in library databases
- To start your research, type into a database the search word(s) that describe ONE ASPECT of your topic (look in this guide for a list of library databases to perform your search in)
- Note that you will need to design several different searches to find info on different aspects of your topic
- Below is a search designed to find info on nursing considerations for high blood pressure in pregnant women. You might need to design a different, modified search to find out how high blood pressure in pregnant women affects fetal stillbirth, for example.
click image to enlarge:
(Click to enlarge the image)
To start your research, type into the database the search word(s) that describe your topic.
Example: “high blood pressure”
- Option: Use AND to connect your ideas and focus your search: “high blood pressure” AND pregnancy
- Option: Use quotation marks to keep a phrase together in your search: “high blood pressure”
- Option: In the same box, use OR to expand your search to synonyms or related ideas: pregnancy OR prenatal
- Option: Use an asterisk to find word variations. For example, nurs* finds nurse, nurses, nursing, nurse practitioner
3. FINALLY, design your advanced search to use in search engines like Google
Google and Google Scholar also give you the power to construct complex searches.
Use a similar same technique as constructing a search in a medical database:
(click on image to enlarge)
- Option: Use AND to connect your ideas and focus your search: “high blood pressure” AND pregnancy
- Option: Use quotation marks to keep a phrase together in your search: “high blood pressure”
- Option: Within parenthesis, use OR to expand your search to synonyms or related ideas: pregnancy OR prenatal
Note – Google generally finds variants of words by default.
