This page contains help resources for some of our main databases in the field of health and life sciences. Some of the resources are provided by the database owners and others have been created in-house. For help selecting which databases to use see our section on using databases.
This video demonstrates how to carry out and save a keyword search in CINAHL. It is also useful for searching Medline.
This video demonstrates how to carry out advanced search in CINAHL using subject headings and keywords, finding full-text articles and sending articles to reference management software. It is also useful for searching Medline.
This video provides an introduction to the different search options available in the Cochrane Library, the content types in your results, filtering results, using the medical subject headings (MeSH) and accessing the Cochrane help menus.
The information in this video is useful for all ProQuest databases, including all collections with a focus on Nursing, Public Health Psychology, Sports Medicine and Social Work.
To make sure that your search strategy is consistent across all the databases you are using, you will need to understand any differences that exist to how they each apply Boolean operators, adjacency (or proximity operators) and search symbols such as truncation, wildcard and phrase searching. You can find this information in the help section of the individual databases you are using. You can also use this handy database syntax guide that pulls together this information for most of the major databases.