How to Use Evidence-Based Dental Practices to Improve Your Clinical Decision Making, Excerpt 9 If the search is not yielding the expected results, consider using synonyms for search terms, including variations of spelling, such as U.S. versus U.K. spelling of terms. For instance, a synonym for “pregnant women” is “pregnancy.” Searching different terms for the same concept can yield different results. Databases will often have a controlled vocabulary, which is preferred terminology that is found in the database’s thesaurus and can be very helpful when searching for relevant literature, as database thesauri typically include all synonyms for a search term. A team of indexers is responsible for reading all included materials in any given database and identifying the main concepts represented in each individual work once the main topics are identified, the indexer assigns subject headings to the work using the preferred terminology. Using the preferred terminology therefore standardizes the search process, making it easier and quicker to locate relevant literature. The searcher should consider looking up search terms in the database’s thesaurus and using the suggested term, which will yield results in which the term is one of the main subjects of the retrieved literature. If a database does not use a controlled vocabulary, consider searching by a specific field such as title, abstract, or author to further limit results. Keyword searches will look for the terms to appear anywhere in the record, while searching in a specific field limits where the term will appear. The majority of the resources described below allow searching by phrase by placing the phrase within quotation marks. Most also recognize common misspellings and abbreviations, and will suggest alternative search terms when no results are found. In addition, most of the resources below search plurals automatically. Boolean searching refers to connecting search terms with one of the following three terms: AND, OR, or NOT. When combining two terms with AND, search results will contain both terms, resulting in fewer results than searching using only one of the terms. Combining terms with OR will return results that contain at least one of the terms, resulting in a higher number of search results than if only one of the terms was searched. Combining two terms with NOT will yield results in which the first term appears but not the second term, narrowing the number of results (Figure 2.2). Figure 2.2: Examples of Boolean Searching Periodontal Disease Pregnant Women AND Periodontal Disease Pregnant Women OR Periodontal Disease Pregnant Women NOT