Keyword searching: phrases
2004 version 2
24 May 2004
Searching for phrases
You may use adj to request that 2 words be retrieved only if they are adjacent to one another and in the given sequence. You will have noticed that this is implied where a phrase is typed, eg coronary heart disease in Figure 27 . Brackets are required around the phrase when combining terms in a complex query. There is no way of searching specifically by upper or lower case.
Add a number after adj to specify how many additional words you are prepared to accept in between those you are searching for, regardless of word order. For example typing (home adj3 help).ti. will retrieve home help or help in the home in the titles of articles. Note that certain words with little intrinsic meaning like 'the', 'is', 'an' are not counted by the system in most fields (called stopwords). The brackets included in this example are optional.
Quotes can be used to search for an exact phrase, and must be used where a number or a combination term (and, or, not) is used, as Ovid could interpret it as being part of a previous search set or an instruction. For example interleukin2, interleukin-2 or interleukin 2 can be searched in the title as (interleukin2 or "interleukin 2").ti. If you want to retrieve a phrase including stopwords then search in quotes eg "sensitivity and specificity".
Figure 30: Use of quotes. Note hyphens are interpreted by the system as a space .
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