Quotes

In the previous examples, you may have noticed some phrases are in quotes. When searching for phrases where you want to keep the words in that order, use quotation marks: "type 1 diabetes" or "continuous glucose monitor".

Searching without the quotes will look for both words, but not necessarily together - by default it is an AND search: "glucose AND monitoring" - it will return items that contain the words glucose and monitoring, but not necessarily the phrase "glucose monitoring"
Putting quotation marks around a phrase tells the database you need your results that have both words next to each other - it treats the key phrase as one keyword

Compare the search below in PubMed:

No Quotes - 14,176 results
With Quotes - 9,771 results - all which should be more relevant to your topic!

Truncation

Truncation is a searching technique in which a word ending is replaced by a symbol. Usually, it is an asterisk (*) but can sometimes be a question mark (?) or dollar sign ($).
For example, you are doing a search on the interactive aspects of the Internet. You might structure your search like this:

Interact* AND Internet

By searching "Interact*" you are telling the database you want it to find every word that begins with those letters.
Interact* will retrieve:
- interact
- interactive
- interaction
- interactivity

Limiters/Filtering Results

Limiters are powerful tools in databases that allow us to refine search results to make them more relevant. You are probably familiar with limiters, if you have ever shopped online.

For example:

You are searching for boots in Amazon - you type boots into the search bar and get over 90,000 results - far to many to sift through, so using the limiters you refine your search for boots. You click on the following limiters on the left side of the screen:

Screenshot of a search for boots on Amazon.com, showing over 90,000 results.

Women's Rain Footwear
Popular Brands
Price from $50 to $100
Size 9.5

And you are down to just 53 results to look at, and all should be relevant to the types of boots I actually want! Of course, there are several other limiters to choose from, like color, specific brand, etc.

Screenshot of a filtered boot search on Amazon.com, with 53 results.

Similarly, we can refine results in library databases using limiters. Some of those ways are to narrow by:

full text access
date
subject
source type (academic journal, magazine, newspaper, etc)
language
and more - databases filtering options will vary

In the screenshot of an Embase search below, notice the many different filtering options.

Screenshot of an Embase search, highlighting the many ways the search can be filtered.