Physical Therapy Overview  

Use  a truncation symbol, often an asterisk *,  to search for variations of words (called truncation). 

Example: educ* searches by 'OR' ing together words that stem from the root, so it would be like searching for education OR educator(s) OR educable OR educational OR educationally, etc.

Remember that truncation turns off the automatic term mapping in PubMED.

Using Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT will help refine your search. Many databases and catalogs offer drop down boxes to select an operator. If you are typing them in your search remember that some only accept capitalized operators.

This guide is designed to give you an overview of searching for information that will be helpful to physical therapists. Searching for information in the physical therapy area will require knowledge of several different areas: medicine, anatomy, physiology, other allied professions, health policy, etc. Each database or catalog will be different so you will need to be familiar with many different types of search sources and techniques.

1. Write your research question out.
2. Define the important concepts of your question.
3. Select keywords that you think might be used to represent these concepts.
4. Select subject headings that you think an indexer or cataloger may have used to represent the concept.
5. Decide how to effectively use the keywords and subjects in your search: databases selection, Boolean operators, limitors, subheadings, etc.
6. Run your searches and refine, refine, refine!

Click below to be able to print out a worksheet to formulate your search.