Now we’re going to search a database with keywords, while using the truncation and Boolean operators learned in the previous section.
Remember our question:
What physical therapy strengthening interventions are recommended for pediatric cerebral palsy patients?
You will want to start your search with fewer terms and add more as needed. Identify the core concepts that are essential to your search. This usually includes your population and intervention. We will save the outcome terms and will use them if we need to narrow our results to more specific items.
This is a therapy question, investigating physical therapy interventions, so we will start with our main allied health database CINAHL.
Start with these terms:
KEY CONCEPTS |
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Pediatric* OR Paediatric* OR Child* |
AND |
Strength* OR Muscle strength* OR Resistance Training OR Resistance exercise* OR Progressive resistance |
AND |
Improved gait OR Walk* |
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AND |
AND |
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Cerebral palsy OR CP |
Balanc* OR Weight distribut* |
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In CINAHL, we can use the existing search boxes and add our terms. You can copy and paste right from the table (or any search strategy document) into the CINAHL search boxes.
CINAHL will automatically “Suggest Subject Terms” for you, but since we’re starting only with keywords, make sure that box is not ticked for now.
Next, we'll enter our search terms, including truncation and Boolean operators. We've entered our major concepts in each search box provided. You'll see that the database automatically searches subsequent boxes using "AND". Click search.
If we want to narrow the results, we can limit the search to preferred publication types, limit by date, or add the terms for our outcome to narrow the topic.
For more information on how to save articles or use citation management software send us an email or sign up for one of our online courses.
To request the full text of an article, fill out our Request an Article form.
