1. Maternal & Child Health Pipeline Program
Scientific Foundations
Search and Retrieve
Levi Watkins Learning Center
Alabama State University
June 6, 2012
Inga Moten
Health Sciences Librarian

2. Finding Sources:
Search Tips
Keywords and Synonyms
Quotation Marks
Limiters
Boolean Operators
Truncation
Locations
Library Catalog
Electronic Databases
E-Journals

3. Pick out key words & use synonyms
Topic:
maternal and child health
Keywords:
maternal, child, health
Synonyms:
motherly, protective
children, school age, pre-
school, infant, toddler, girl, boy, pediatric, paediatric, juveni
le, adolescent
healthful, healing, hygienic, vigorous, wholesome

4. Pick out key words & use synonyms
Topic:
Health disparities
Keywords:
Health disparities
Synonyms:
healthful, healing, hygienic, vigorous, wholesome
discrepancy, imbalance, disproportion, inequality, unequal,
diversity, difference, inconsistency, variation, variable

5. Limiters
Fields (searches only in the
author, title, subject, abstract, etc. portion of the
documents in the database)
Date (searches for a specific issue date, year or range of
available issues/dates)
Full-text (searches only for documents in which the entire
text is available)
Peer Reviewed, Refereed, or Scholarly (searches for a
specific type of journal)

6. Boolean Operators
Used to connect, associate, or eliminate additional search terms
AND
OR
NOT

7. AND will give you the intersection between two groups when you want your search
result to contain elements from both groups.
e.g. child and infant will retrieve results containing both these terms.
Use OR when you want any of the search terms to be included in your search result
but you don't care which. "OR” means more. It will expand your search to include
more results. OR is often used to look for synonyms or similar concepts
e.g. child or infant will retrieve results which contain at least one of the search
terms.
Use NOT to exclude search terms which you do not wish to include in your results.
e.g. child not infant will retrieve results containing the word child but will exclude
results containing the word infant.

8. Truncation
• For example, if you enter:
– dispar*
Database will retrieve: disparate,
disparities, disparity
• Symbols will be different (“*”, “!”, or “?”)
depending on the particular database.
• Refer to the system’s “help”, “hint”, or “tips”
feature for this and other helpful search tips.

9. Let’s search and retrieve:
• Go to PubMed, www.pubmed.gov .
• Search topic keyword(s)
• Limit to humans, How many?
• Limit to review articles, How Many?
• Limit to English language, How Many?
• Limit to Full Text, How Many?