Skip to main content

Combine Search Terms Using OR (#13)

Some resources will allow you to combine your keywords in different ways. One of those ways is to combine terms using the word “or”.

Venn diagram showing the overlap of words that mean the same thing
Venn diagram showing the overlap of words that mean the same thing





You use OR to combine words that mean the same thing. Authors may refer to the same thing using different terminology. To ensure that your search retrieves all the items relevant you should include a range of terms.

For example someone may refer to “kidney disease” but another person may call it “renal disease”. Your search needs to return both sets of information, so you should search for items that contain either kidney OR renal disease.

Here’s a short animation from HEE explaining the use of OR:

You can learn more about how to combine search terms by completing our etutorial Develop Your Search Skills.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Access the big 4 medical journals for free

  Get articles on key, major trials and practice changing news. You can access the big 4 key journals for free. What are the big 4 medical journals? The big 4 medical journals are: BMJ (British Medical Journal) The Lancet NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) How do you access the big 4 journals? NHS staff can access all 4 journals online using the same username / password – your NHS OpenAthens username / password. Not sure what an OpenAthens username is? Complete our etutorial. Get your OpenAthens username by completing the online form . Keele University staff and students get automatic access on campus but will need to use their email address and password to log in when off-campus. Where can you access the big 4 journals from? Our journal collections are not necessarily available from the publishers’ websites. NHS staff can browse our journal collections on Browzine. Whereas Keele University staff...

Introduction to Referencing and Plagiarism

What is the point of referencing? Why does everyone make such a big deal about it? What is plagiarism and how serious is it really? When you start to complete your literature searches you must also start your referencing process. Complete our etutorial Introduction to Referencing and Plagiarism to learn: What is referencing and why does it matter? What is plagiarism and how can you avoid it? What do you need to create a reference?

British Journal of Surgery

  The British Journal of Surgery is a surgical specialist journal, publishing a wide range of articles and research across many specialties. What articles does it publish? Here are some articles from a recent issue : Beyond SANO: the future of active surveillance for oesophageal cancer p. znag066 Wang, Jun; Liang, Fei; Pang, Qingsong; … Hui, Zhouguang The morbidity of oesophagectomy and its impact on patient’s quality of life stimulated the search for organ preservation strategies for oesophageal cancer. The Surgery As Needed for Oesophageal cancer (SANO) trial is a multicentre, stepped-wedge, non-inferiority cluster-randomized trial comparing active surveillance (AS) with standard surgery (SUR) in patients with a clinical complete response (cCR) after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy 1 . AS was non-inferior to SUR in terms of overall survival at 2-year follow-up. By randomizing hospitals instead of individual patients and by sequential crossover of centres to the active survei...