If your search only involves one or two words, the basic search is fine, but we recommend using the “Advanced Search” or “Multi-Field Search” options. Advanced Search allows you to enter your search words one at a time and then tell the database how you want it to combine them. Multi-field search allows you to put in all your words at once.

Advanced search is the default option, and is how the database is designed to work. To use this, search for one concept at a time:

Click Search History at the top of the page.
Select the check boxes next to the concepts you want to combine.
Click AND to merge the searches if you want both words or ideas to appear in your search.
Click OR to merge the searches if you don't mind which word or phrase appears - for example, searching for articles which relate to teenagers or adolescents.

For example, at the time of writing, a search for breech finds 2178 items and a search for twins finds 5204. When combined together, Maternity and Infant Care finds 180 articles which match.

Multi-field search provides three boxes for search words. It is a faster way to search, and will often retrieve more articles, but may not be as accurate. This allows you to search for multiple concepts simultaneously:

Ensure that the drop-down boxes between the three search boxes read AND.
Enter one concept into each box (you can leave a box blank if you need to).
If there are multiple words for the same concept, enter than into the same box with OR between them. For instance, teenagers OR adolescents.

Narrowing your search

Once you search, you can narrow the selection down using options in the left-hand column. The most useful ones are “Years”, to select the date, and “Publication Type” which allows you to narrow the results down to particular types of information such as Guidelines or particular types of research.

Each item will have an abstract you can read, which will highlight the words you searched for. If you decide you’d like to read the whole thing, there may be a web link (for news items, for instance) or for journal articles there will be a “Full Text Finder” link which will check to see whether we have the article available through our online library.

See the video further down this page for a brief demonstration of the use of this database.