ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF TEXT WORD AND TITLE WORD SEARCHING

Advantages:

• Text word searching is useful if you are searching for something that has a proper name, like the "McGill Pain Questionnaire" or the "bjork-shiley catheter", or if a common "buzzword" is used to represent a concept, such as "latex allergy".

• Text word searching is useful if you are searching for something that is new, rare, or not well-represented in the literature. In these cases, there may not be an appropriate Medical Subject Heading for your term, so text word searching is a useful option.

Disadvantages:

• Because the search only retrieves citations containing the exact title or abstract word(s) searched, relevant articles are missed if the author uses another term/synonym to describe the same topic.

This is what a text word search looks like. You can enter the term, followed by .tw. to do a text word search:

#	Search History	Results	Display	What was searched?
1	latex allergy.tw.	338	Display	Searched for "latex" allergy as a text word (.tw.) in the titles and abstracts of articles

TITLE WORD SEARCHING IS A BETTER OPTION

Because text word seaching can be sloppy, and can miss relevant literature, try just searching for TITLE words instead. Title word searching identifies specific words that the authors have used in the titles of articles.

Advantages:

• Title words are usually the predominant topic of an article, so the articles retrieved in the search tend to be very relevant to the topic being searched.

• If only a few articles are needed rather than a comprehensive search, this strategy is very effective.

Disadvantages:

• Because the search only retrieves citations containing the exact title word(s) searched, relevant articles are missed if the author uses another term/synonym to describe the same topic.

This is what a title word search looks like. You can enter the term, followed by .ti. to do a title word search:

#	Search History	Results	Display	What was searched?
1	(latex allergy).ti.	338	Display	Searched for "latex" allergy as a title word phrase (.ti.) in the titles and abstracts of articles

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