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PAPB 501: Understanding and Implementing Clinical Research Library Guide

This is the course guide that accompanies the Your Path to Discovering resources literature searching lecture of PAPB 501: Understanding and Implementing Clinical Research.

Create a Search Formula for Relating Terms

How databases such as Google, PubMed, LibrarySearch, etc, work is that they retrieve information based on the terms you enter and the criteria you set. Unless you have a really unusual word you will need to use more than one term per search.

Creating a search formula is a way to communicate to the database how you want the words related to one another. Much like telling a waiter I want a burger and fries, a cheeseburger Not with pickles or I want a Coke or Pepsi....

To create a search formula do the following: 

Term 1 + Connector + Term 2

Connectors: AND, OR, NOT

The part of the search strategy that tells the database how to relate the terms to one another are the words, AND, OR , NOT. Below is a chart of when to  use each of these in your searches.