| Description | Example | ||
| "..." | Double quotation marks | Exact phrase searching | "trauma therapy" |
| AND | Boolean operators | Includes both terms | "trauma" AND "therapy" |
| OR | Boolean operators | Includes either both (the one or the other) | "trauma" OR "PTSD" |
| NOT | Boolean operators | Excluded term(s) | "trauma" NOT "brain injury" |
| () | Parenthesis | Allows complex queries to be layered | ("trauma" OR "PTSD") AND ("therapy" OR "psychosocial treatment") |
| MeSH | Medical subject heading | A controlled vocabulary system used for indexing and searching articles in biomedical databases | "trauma"[mesh] AND "foster care" [mesh] |
| ti: | Title word | Search term should be found specially within the title of the article | ti:("trauma" OR "PTSD") AND ("therapy" OR "psychosocial treatment") |
| ab: | Abstract word | Search term should be found specially within the abstract of the article | ab:("trauma" OR "PTSD") AND ("therapy" OR "psychosocial treatment") |
| tab | Title and abstract word | Search term should be found either within the title or abstract of the article | tiab:("trauma" OR "PTSD") AND ("therapy" OR "psychosocial treatment") |
| * | Truncation | Adds more characters |
traum*
|
| exp | Explode | Search system includes all narrower terms that fall under that term in the controlled vocabulary hierarchy |
exp trauma
|
| NEAR/n | NEAR operator | Requires words are adjacent with n words in between regardless of the word order | families NEAR/2 support |
| NEXT | NEXT operator | Requires words are adjacent to each other in the order times in | care NEXT taking |
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