Too many articles? You can increase specificity by narrowing or refining your search:
- Narrow your question.
- Use more specific search terms.
- Search using subject headings (controlled vocabulary) rather than keywords (free text/ textword searching).
- Apply subheadings to subject headings to limit results to certain aspects of your topic.
- Combine terms using AND to represent other aspects of the question.
- Apply limiters such as English language, human subject, age group, publication type (e.g., review article, RCTs, etc), country, or years of publication.
Too few articles? You can increase sensitivity by broadening your search:
- Broaden your question.
- Find more search terms from relevant records.
- Try different combinations of terms.
- Use truncation (* or $) in keyword searching to retrieve variant word endings.
- Add synonymous and related terms and combine them using OR.
- Use both subject heading and keywords as search terms.
- Use the Explode feature of subject heading searches.
- Apply all subheadings (or qualifiers) to subject headings.
- Search further back in time.
- Include all publication types.
Do not forget to use the Help function of the database to increase your searching effectiveness!
