Use keywords and MESH (medical subject headings) or other subject headings/thesaurus terms that describe concepts in your research topic. Try a variety of search expressions for targeted results.

• Use quotation marks to search a phrase.
• Use an asterisk to search multiple endings of a term.
• Combine subject and keyword searching.

Examples:

concept 1 AND concept 2

• "nursing practice" AND ethic*
• "emotional health" nurs* AND strategies

Notes: ethic* = ethic, ethics, ethical.
Truncation is a symbol (*) added to the root of a word to broaden a search to include all word endings.
For "emotional health" nurs* in the above search, since no boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT) is used between the phrase ("emotional health") and keyword (nurs*), the database does a proximity of 5 search. Therefore, the results will include the phrase (emotional health) and keywords(nurse/nurses/nursed/nursing) within a 5-word word range of each other, in any order in the results.

To view the sample searches below, copy and paste then set filters, add terms and/or change databases to edit the results. Try searches in multiple databases, or search a single database. Try a variety of search as shown in the three sets of examples below.

Topic: Nurses and (Stress or Anxiety)

• DE "Nurses" AND "stress management"

Topic: Nursing Trends

• ("digital age" OR technology) AND SU nursing AND trends
• (MH "Nurse Administrators+/TD") [Note: In this example Nurse Administrators is the major heading with Trends as the subheading]

Topic: Leadership and Nursing

• SU nursing AND SU transformational leadership
• (MH "Advanced Practice Nursing") AND (MH "Leadership")

Notes:

DE = Subject (descriptor)
MH = Medical subject heading (MeSH, the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus); searches both major and minor headings
MM = Medical subject heading (MeSH); searches only major headings
SU = Subject