Slide 1
This short At a Glance module illustrates using different forms of truncation along
with Boolean operators in the new ProQuest Dialog.
Slide 2
In this example we will search the databases—Embase®, The Lancet, and MEDLINE® in the Pharmaceutical & Biomedical category to illustrate left, mid and ending truncation, as well as the Boolean operators AND to connect different terms, OR to connect synonyms and NOT to eliminate terms. The search deals with the relationship between hypoglycemia, the heart and women.
Movie
First we'll enter our search term in the first line of the search box. *-G-L-Y-C-*-M-*. This will retrieve hypoglycemia using left-hand truncation, glycemia and glycaemia with the British spelling and glycemic or glycemia from the ending truncation. Next, we'll limit our search term to just the title of the article by selecting it from the drop-down box.
Secondly, we'll limit the search by adding another term. We'll select the Boolean operator AND to connect our next term wom?n to retrieve woman or women. The question mark takes the place of one character. We'll OR that together with female. Notice we don't have to add an asterisk because ProQuest Dialog automatically retrieves singular and plurals.
Next, we'll connect our next search term with another AND operator and put in our third search term cardio* to get all forms of the word cardio. We'll OR that with together with the synonym heart with no asterisk because ProQuest Dialog will pick up singulars and plurals.
Now we'll add a row by clicking on the + sign next to Add a row to provide more search boxes. We'll use the NOT operator to eliminate a search term. We're going to eliminate the word RAT or RATS from our search. We've completed our search strategy so we'll click the Search button. We've retrieved 3,354 results.
We'll take a look at some of the records, so we'll scroll down and look at the records. Notice the first record contains one search term glycaemic with the British spelling, also our search term heart and women. The next record also contains glycaemic again and cardiovascular. If we scroll down to record 5 we see the American spelling glycemia so it looks like our search is fairly on target.
We'll take a look at a record. We'll click on the title of record 1 that comes from The Lancet. We'll scroll down and we see it's a full-text record. We can translate the record into another language if we want. We have the summary with our keywords highlighted, statistics, tables. Now we can save this record in our My Research account or we can go back to the top of the screen and click the Back to Results link and narrow our results further by using the Narrow Results on the right side of the screen and we can also narrow by date range by just moving the date slider.
Slide 4
In summary, you can use truncation in Basic and Advanced Search. Enter your search term using an asterisk before, internally or at the end of a term. You can also substitute one or more question marks, each question mark taking the place of one character. The AND, OR, and NOT Boolean operators are available to connect different terms, synonyms or eliminate a term. Be sure to visit the ProQuest Dialog Customer Information page to learn about the content and features of this new service.
Slide 5
Thank you for reviewing the ProQuest Dialog At a Glance module on Using Truncation
and Boolean operators. Press the Searching tab on the ProQuest Dialog Customer Information page for more search aids and training options.