If you not are yet familiar with basic or advanced search, please visit the respective tutorials:
For example:
sleep AND (disorder OR therapy) NOT wake
looks for items with sleep and all or any of the words disorder or therapy, but not containing wake. Please note the use of parentheses (), which is used to group the subquery.
Also, since AND operator is always implicitly implied, the query is similar to:
sleep (disorder OR therapy) NOT wake
Without the parentheses, the following
sleep disorder OR therapy NOT wake
is similar to
(sleep OR disorder) AND (sleep OR therapy) AND (sleep NOT wake)
To avoid confusion, familiarize yourself with using parentheses to group subqueries.
Use wildcard operator ? to replace a single character, or * to replace zero or more characters. For example use wom?n to look for woman or women.
Respira* includes item with respiration and respiratory, for example.
Using proximity ~ operator, you can search for a phrase with a specific maximum word distance between words. For example (combining with NOT operator):
"acute respiratory"~1 NOT "acute respiratory"
includes "acute upper respiratory" and "acute lower respiratory" but not "acute respiratory".
You can boost a specific search term or phrase using the boost ^ operator. For example, combining with proximity operator as in the previous section, you can search for "acute respiratory", but with preference to "acute upper respiratory":
"acute respiratory"~1 OR "acute upper respiratory"^10
Notice that the number of results is similar to the following:
"acute respiratory"~1
But the order of the results is different, with the former give preference to "acute upper respiratory".
In advanced search, you can search specifically in a particular field. Such fields are available as field keyword when you build the query manually.
Some fields, like MeSH term (available as mesh_term keyword), has an exact sub-field keyword, in which you can use to search for exact phrase. For example, the following looks for items with MeSH terms like "Infant", "Infant, Newborn", or any MeSH terms with "Infant" in it:
mesh_term:(infant)
While the following looks for items that contain exact "Infant" MeSH term.
mesh_term.exact:(infant)
See the next section on fields with exact sub-field keyword.
Below are advanced search fields and their field keyword equivalent:
| Search field | Keyword | Exact field | Value* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title | title | No | free form |
| Abstract | abstract | No | free form |
| Journal | journal | No | free form, exact ISSN |
| Journal | journal_name | Yes | free form. See Advanced search** |
| Journal issue date | journal_issue_date | No | "2012-01-01", "[2012-01-01 TO 2012-12-31]" |
| Journal issue date (year) | journal_issue_year | No | "2009" |
| Journal issue date (month) | journal_issue_month | No | "Aug", "3" |
| Journal issue date (day) | journal_issue_day | No | "3", "29" |
| Fulltext | fulltext | No | "yes" or "no" |
| Author | author | No | free form, "Ahmad Sarji S" |
| MeSH term | mesh_term | Yes | "Infant", "Infant, Newborn", "Infant, Newborn*" |
| Publication type | publication_type | Yes | "journal article" |
| Publication date | date_created | No | "2012-01-01", "[2012-01-01 TO 2012-12-31]" |
| PMID | pmid | No | free form, "22210969", "222*" |
| Page | page | No | free form, "10", "1-107" |
| Place of publication | place_of_publication | No | See Advanced search** |
| Publisher | publisher | No | See Advanced search** |
| Age group | age_group | No | See Advanced search** |
| Coverage | coverage | No | See Advanced search** |
| Health care delivery | delivery | No | See Advanced search** |
| Ethnicity | ethnicity | No | See Advanced search** |
| Gender | gender | No | See Advanced search** |
| Primary care setting | primary_care_setting | No | See Advanced search** |
| Special group | special_group | No | See Advanced search** |
| Study design | study_design | No | See Advanced search** |
| Subject system | subject_system | No | See Advanced search** |
| Subject subgroup | subject_subgroup | No | See Advanced search** |
| State | state | No | See Advanced search** |
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