Occupational Therapy

Use efficient search phrases

Google and Google Scholar (like most other search engines) allow the use of Boolean search commands AND, OR, and NOT

Use Boolean commands along with parentheses and quotation marks to construct the most efficient search phrases

Example of an innefficient search:

motor control TBI rehabilitation

Example of a more efficient search:

((motor AND (control OR skill)) AND ("traumatic brain injury" OR TBI) AND (rehabilitation OR therapy))

Why is one search more efficient than the other?

The efficient search will be more effective because it will retrieve articles which use different words for the concepts that are being researched. Where the first search phrase will only retrieve articles with the word rehabilitation, the second search will in grab articles that use "rehabilitation" or "therapy". This effect is multiplied because the efficient search uses this technique of "OR"-ing synonyms together for each concept. The efficient search also uses quotation marks around multi-word phrases, which will tell a search engine that all three words must appear together. Without quotation marks, the search engine might retrieve articles with only single words from the phrase, returning lots of articles about the brain, or injuries in general.

Use "power" searching on google

Similar to using Boolean commands, "power" searching gives you the ability to be very specific when you search google.

specify that search results contain certain filetypes, search for synonyms of your search terms, or only come from websites with certain kinds of urls, like .edu or .gov

Example of a "site" power search:

site:gov (children AND "traumatic brain injury")

In the above example, results will all be government resources or websites

Example of an "inurl" power search:

"clinical trials" inurl:braininjury

In the above example, "braininjury" must occur in the url of the search results

Example of a "filetype" power search:

"traumatic brain injury" filetype:pdf

The search in the above example retrieves only items of the specified filetype

Example of a "synonyms" power search:

  ~guidlines "traumatic brain injury"   

The above exampleretrieves results with synonyms to "guidlines" 

Example of a power search which combines the "synonym" and "inurl" commands:

children ~guidlines inurl:"traumatic brain injury"

The above example retrieves results which contain words that are synonyms to "guidelines", and have the words "traumatic brain injury" in the ur

Portions of the information on power searching are based on information taken from University of Michigan Library’s Libguide Dentistry: Power Searching