Help: Databases and Other Library Resources

 CINAHL (EBSCOhost)

Truncation and Wildcards in CINAHL:

Use an asterisk (*) for truncation - to find words with multiple endings

• e.g. nurs* will find nurse, nurses, nursing, but also nursery

Use a question mark (?) wildcard to replace 1 character

• e.g. Wom?n will find woman or women

Restrictions:

• cannot be used as the first character of a search term
  • e.g. ?ffect
• using wildcards turns off the automatic inclusion of plural and possessive forms of the search word
  • e.g. wom?n will not include womens' or woman's

For more assistance, please see the Help link above.

Proximity Searches in CINAHL:

(from CINAHL Help page)

Using the letter N (near) or W (within) and a number (indicating the number of words) allows a way to search for 2 or more words that occur close to each other.

• N (near): N3 finds the words if they are a max of 3 words apart from one another, regardless of the order in which they appear. E.g. insurance N3 reimbursement will find results like:

  • insurance reimbursement

  • insurance for reimbursement

  • reimbursement practices of insurance companies

  • insurance approval and reimbursement

• W (within): W4 finds words that are within 4 words of one another, in the order entered. E.g. Covid W4 protocols will find results like those below but will not find protocols for Covid:

  • COVID-19 pandemic and public health protocols

  • COVID-19 related protocols

For more assistance, please see the Help link above.

  PubMed



Truncation in PubMed:

Use an asterisk (*) to find words with multiple endings. Must use at least 4 characters before placing the asterisk or the truncation will be ignored.

• E.g. nurs*.
• Ped* is not sufficient and the command will be ignored

Truncation turns off automatic term mapping and the process that includes the MeSH term and any specific terms indented under that term in the MeSH hierarchy. For example, heart attack* will not map to the MeSH term Myocardial Infarction or include any of the more specific terms, e.g., Myocardial Stunning; Shock, Cardiogenic.

Proximity Searches in PubMed:

Used to find terms that are close to each other - in any order.

A proximity search should be formatted like this: "search terms"[field tag:~N]

• include the quotation marks around your terms
• Field tags: Proximity searching is only available in the following search fields
  • [Title] or [ti]
  • [Title/Abstract] or [tiab]
  • [Affiliation] or [ad]

• N stands for the maximum number of words appearing between search terms.
  • Using an N of zero means the search terms must be adjacent to each other - in any order
• E.g. "prenatal vitamins"[Title:~2] - will retrieve citations with the terms prenatal and vitamins with up to two words between them in the title of a citation - prenatal vitamins; prenatal intake of vitamins; vitamins given prenatally

  ProQuest Databases

Proximity Searches in ProQuest:

(from ProQuest Help page)

ProQuest proximity searching differs slightly from CINAHL so please be aware to enter the operators correctly in each database.

Using the letter N ( or the term NEAR) or P (or the term PRE) and a number (indicating the number of words) allows a way to search for 2 or more terms that occur close to each other.

• N (NEAR): N/3 or NEAR/3 finds the words if they are a max of 3 words apart from one another, regardless of the order in which they appear. E.g. insurance N/3 reimbursement or insurance NEAR/3 reimbursement  will find results like:

  • insurance reimbursement

  • insurance for reimbursement

  • reimbursement practices of insurance companies

  • insurance approval and reimbursement

• P (PRE): P/4 or PRE/4 finds words that are within 4 words of one another, in the order entered. E.g. Covid P/4 protocols or Covid PRE/4 protocols  will find results like those below but will not find protocols for Covid:

  • COVID-19 pandemic and public health protocols

  • COVID-19 related protocols

Wildcards and Truncation in ProQuest:

Use when words contain variant spellings.

• Question mark (?) replaces a single character
  • e.g. Wom?n finds women or woman
  • Assistan?? finds assistance or assistants
• Asterisk (*) can be used at end of a word or in the middle.
  • e.g. nurs* finds nurse, nurses, nursing, nursery
  • n*t  finds words that begin with n and end with t and have up to 5 letters in between. e.g. nest, night, newest, nicest

For more information, please see the ProQuest Truncation and Proximity Help link above.

   Scopus - Cited reference searching