• Cancer (as a single word)
• Cancer pain (as a phrase)
• Maddocks (author surname)
• Ian Maddocks (full author name)

At this stage you can simply press the ‘search’ button. However you may wish to be more selective in your search, by choosing to modify any of the following search preferences. At any time, if you wish to start another search, click the ‘clear’ button and begin again.

Search fields

If you don’t select a field, it will search in ALL of alternative fields. Or, you can search just in the Title, Author, Abstract or Keyword fields. For example, if you know the author name you are searching for, then tick ‘Author’, if you are interested in a particular topic, then a search within the abstract, keywords or title fields will be more appropriate.

Type of literature

If you do not select a literature type, then all types will be included in your search. However, you can choose to search for one type only, either journal articles, conferences, theses or other (reports etc).

Publication year

You can specify a year or range of years for your search by selecting the years from the dropdown lists. If you do not choose a year all the years covered in the databases will be searched.

Order of results

You can order your search results by:

• Date (newest to oldest)
• Author (alphabetical order by first author)
• Abstract ID (numerical order, smallest to biggest)
• Title (alphabetical order by abstract title. Titles starting with quote marks come first).

QUESTION 2
How do I view my results?

The results of each search will automatically be listed. The most recent record will appear first, unless you selected a different order. When you have finished viewing the list select the ‘Back to Search’ icon (at the bottom of the page).

You may wish to view the results from an earlier search. To do this, press the ‘display’ button beside the result count in the search history record box at the bottom of the search page.

QUESTION 3
How do I combine searches?

Select Advanced Searching if you wish to combine searches within the results. For example, if your first search was ‘pain’, then search results for pain would appear in the Search history box as Set No 1. If your second search was ‘cancer’, then results for cancer would appear as Set No 2. To combine these searches you should type ‘1 and 2’ in the search box. Your third search result will then present you with the results of ‘Pain AND Cancer’.

You can also use ‘OR’. For the above search, you could type in ‘1 OR 2’ to search for ‘Pain’ OR ‘Cancer’.

You can combine more than 2 results of your searches. If you have performed 4 searches as follows:

1 Pain
2 Cancer
3 Bone disease
4 Heart

To combine, Pain, Cancer and Heart together, you would need to type in ‘1 and 2 and 4’ in the search box.

QUESTION 4
Can I use wildcards in my search?

Wildcards can be helpful if you can’t quite remember the full name of an author or if you want to find similar variations of the same word.

By default, a hidden wildcard character ‘$’ (that is programmed into the software) will be added to the beginning and the end of the search term you enter. This will also automatically occur if you select ALL search fields, or an individual field of title, abstract or keywords. For example, the search term ‘palliat’ will become ‘$palliat$’ and will pick up terms such as palliation, palliative and semipalliative.

However, when you select the search field of ‘author’, the hidden wildcard character ‘$’ will only be added to the end, but not the beginning of the entered search term/s. For example, the search term ‘Good’ in the author field will become ‘Good$’ and will pick up authors such as Goodwood, Goodwin, Goode and Goodkin, but not Evergood.

If you explicitly type in the wildcard characters ($) at the beginning and/or end of the entered keyword/s, this will override any hidden wildcards.