Once you have identified the concepts of your question, you need to list ALL the various ways that each concept may be identified in the literature. Synonyms are an integral part of systematic searching and there are a number of approaches you should take with each component of your question in your quest to identify all of them.
Search filters (or "hedges"), are ready-made search strings for specific topics. While search filters vary in quality and design, they offer an excellent basis for new searches and may even replace one concept or sections of a search completely. If reusing search filters that others have developed, please cite or acknowledge them.
Identify relevant keywords for the concepts to ensure the search is comprehensive by identifying different spellings, tenses and word variants of keywords, synonyms, and related concepts. The example below shows the first few keywords we will use for each concept. Using the tools above, the researcher will expand this list to include as many different synonyms as they can think of for each component of the question.
How effective is video game-based balance rehabilitation as an adjunctive therapy to conventional rehabilitation in stroke patients over the age of 65?
Truncation allows you to type the root of a word into the database, put an asterisk at the end of it, and have the database search that root with all of its possible endings.
eg. truncating truncation to truncat* in a search would retrieve any results with truncate, truncated, truncates, truncating, and truncation.
The trick to truncation is knowing how far to truncate a word. You have to make it short enough to include as many variations as possible, but keep it long enough that you don’t end up including variations you don’t want.
eg. truncating catheter to cath* will retrieve catheter, catheters, catheterization, and catheterisation. However, it will also retrieve catholic, catharsis, and cathode (to name a few). These are likely not relevant to your catheter concept.
Phrase searching is a very effective way of creating a more specific search. By putting quotation marks around two or more words, you force the database or search engine to find your words together in the document instead of separately. For example, if you search for cardiac arrest without quotation marks, you will receive results which have the word cardiac in them and the word arrest in them, but not necessarily together. If you search "cardiac arrest", you will only receive results with that exact phrase.
Proximity searching is a method of searching for two or more words that occur within a certain number of words from each other. This can be ideal for those searches which have a number of phrases for a concept with combinations of the same words. In an EBSCO database, "search term" n5 "search term" finds the terms within 5 words of each other in either order. You can modify the number to customize the search to your specific needs. You can also combine phrase searching with proximity searching. For example, "climate change" n4 activism will find articles containing the word activism within 4 words of the phrase "climate change" such as "climate change activism" or "activism on the topic of climate change."
To do this in an OVID database, you would search "climate change" adj4 activism
Regarding searching keywords in specific fields (title, abstract, etc....). A search performed in an EBSCOhost database (CINAHL, APA PsycInfo) without specifying a search field is called an "unqualified search." An unqualified search does not search the entire article. It searches the following fields as per the database platform EBSCO:
On the OVID platform (Medline, EBM Reviews), if you enter an advanced search without specifying a particular field, Ovid defaults to a multi-purpose (.mp) search which searches several fields at once. The fields searched by the .mp search may vary, but in general include Title, Original Title, Abstract, Subject Heading, Name of Substance, and Registry Word fields.
It is up to you to decide if field codes are appropriate for your search. Please consult a subject librarian for more specialized support.