Alternative & Complementary Medicine: Article Databases

First, organize your research topic into concepts. Concepts are typically nouns or noun phrases.

• For example, if you are researching alternative medicine to back pain, your concepts would be:
  • alternative medicine
  • bak pain

Using a databases's Advanced Search, enter each concept and its synonyms into a separate search line.

• "alternative medicine"
• "back pain" OR "spine injury"

Use quotation marks around phrases, these are typically noun phrases that you would find a definition of in a dictionary.

• "alternative medicine"

Use * for truncation.

• pain* will find pain, painful, painfulness, etc.

Limit to peer-reviewed articles if necessary.

Limit by date if necessary.

Too many or too few results?

• Use the thesaurus or Subject Index to find related, broader, narrower, and similar terms OR specific terms that the databases uses to describe a topic.
  • Too many results? Use a narrower term.
  • Too few results? Use a broader term.

Find an article that looks interesting?

• Click on the article's title.
• Look at the subjects given to an article to find related terms and run additional searches using these terms.
• Click on the references, cited by, or see similar documents links to find related articles.