Default operator The default operator that is used to group search terms together. Often if two terms are entered into a search engine,
the AND operator is inserted by default, but sometimes the search engines treat the two terms as a phrase.
Phrases are more precise than AND, so it is important to know what default is being applied so that the sensitivity of the
search can be assessed or explored.
Boolean operators What operators are available to group search terms. The full Boolean operator list is AND, OR, NOT, but not all search
engines offer some or all of these.
Phrase searching Does the search enginer permit terms to be searched as phrases, for example "breast cancer". Sometimes phrases are
activated by the use of quotation marks, sometimes phrase searching is the default option for the search engine.
Nesting Parentheses can be used in some interfaces to allow similar terms to be grouped together and then combined with other
concepts, e.g. (BREAST OR COLON) AND CANCER
If parentheses are not used, terms may be searched in an order of precedence determined by the Boolean operators, for
example NOT may be processed before AND, and AND may be processed before OR
Truncation Truncation is the use of a symbol (often but not always *) to capture terms with different endings. For example, train*
would capture train, trains, trained, training
Field tags Field searching involves limiting search terms to specific fields. This can be achieved in some interfaces by using a 'tag' for
example a search in the title field might be signalled by the following cancer:ti. Some interfaces offer options to select the
field of interest (e.g. title) and then add search terms to search just in that field.
Hyphens Hyphenated words might be treated as words separated by spaces in some interfaces - so a single search will find both
hyphenated and unhyphenated versions. Other interfaces will recognise hyphens, so two terms need to be searched for - the
hyphenated and unhyphenated versions of the term,
Help pages Does the website have help pages that provide details on how to search the site?
Example This is an example search strategy that shows what level of search complexity might be possible.
Saved searches Does the site offer the opportunity to save the search so it can be rerun at a later date?
Export tagged Can the records in the database be exported, and most importantly can they be exported in a format that allows easy loading
into bibliographic software.