Tips for searching well

Searching can be difficult. We use the MeSH dictionary to help direct your search. Try to use as few words as possible to describe what you are interested in. Here are some tips.

• include search terms within quotation marks to prompt the search engine to search for that specific word or phrase,
• use * to search wild cards of search term stem (e.g., violen* = “violence”, “violent”),
• avoid the use of “stop” words, such as prepositions (in, of, on), conjunctions (and, but) and articles (a, the) to reduce the number of irrelevant results,
• use hyphens to indicate a result type we want to avoid or reduce in our search results (e.g., violence – child maltreatment)
• apply the AND operator to enable results that include an intervention and an evaluation (e.g., design types), and a year or range of year