Identifying keywords

Before you start your search, it is important to consider:

What are the meaningful concepts (keywords) in your topic?
Could there be synonyms or similar terms that you could also search with?

Strategies for finding search terms

The How to find search terms video below provides tips on how to find good keywords and what to consider.

Video (6:53). How to find search terms. Faculty of Medicine, Lund University.

In the video PubMed: Identifying Search Terms below, you will learn more about how to find useful search terms using PubMed.

PubMed: Identifying Search Terms. Johns Hopkins.

Video (5:17) How to search with Subject Headings combined with text words in the CINAHL database.
Library and ICT, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University.

Searching with subject headings and free text

The articles in the databases are tagged with subject headings, making it easier to find relevant articles with subject heading searches. The subject headings are controlled, meaning that it is determined which word should be used to search for a certain phenomenon. A subject heading corresponds to a word and its synonyms and includes different spellings.

A free text search looks for the larger part of the article description, such as the title, abstract and the author's keywords.

If you want to do a comprehensive search, like for a literature review, you may need to combine a subject heading search with a free text search, as the most recent articles are not always tagged with subject headings.

Each database has its own list of subject headings, so you need to check which word is used in the database you are in.

Examples of subject headings in different databases:

PubMed - MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)
CINAHL - CINAHL Subject Headings
PsycInfo - APA Thesaurus of Indexed Terms
Embase - Emtree