This video will introduce syntax to increase the sensitivity of a search strategy.
Let's say I have ten papers that I want to retrieve in my search.
All these papers are on cognitive behavioural therapy and related interventions.
These are the titles of the papers, and I've highlighted the CBT terms in bold text.
If I want to include all these papers in my search strategy, I can do a few things.
I can simply copy out all of the CBT terms into a long list and combine them all with OR. That will retrieve all those 10 papers.
But that makes for a long search strategy.
And it also risks the fact that I have missed a way that an author describes CBT that I haven't identified yet.
So I can use search syntax to increase the sensitivity of this search and make the search a lot easier to read.
So here's the same list of those CBT terms in a different order.
So, the first thing I will do is use truncation.
Truncation is where we take a stem of a word, and then we can retrieve possible endings.
So, in this example, I can put an asterisk after the 'p' in therapy, delete the 'y' and that will retrieve therapy, singular, or therapies, plural.
So this now means I can delete this line because it's redundant.
I can do the same thing with behaviour.
So I can truncate after the 'o' and that will give us the behaviour US spelling 'ior' and also the British spelling 'iour'.
Alternatively, I can use a wild card.
A wild card can stand for zero or one character.
So if it stands with zero characters, it's going to give us 'ior', or one character, it will retrieve 'iour'.
So I'll go ahead and add that.
So we can combine search syntax.
So I can also add a truncation after the 'r' to retrieve both 'behaviour' and 'behavioural'.
So if I do that in this particular search, I can now delete these other two lines because they will be retrieved in this third line.
We can also add in proximity searching.
And that will retrieve different various forms that we have on our left: 'behavioural therapy', 'behavioural treatment', 'behavioural control'.
So what I can do is combine all these different possible endings with OR
So I can type in 'treatment' or potentially 'treatments', or 'control', or 'approaches'. Then close that bracket.
What I want to do is say let's find 'cognitive behaviour' within so many words of 'therapy', 'treatment', or 'control', or 'approaches'.
So I can put in a proximity indicator, 'adj' if I'm using Ovid, or 'next' or 'near' depending on the database you're using.
And the number of words I want between these two.
In this example we can probably just use one.
So that will retrieve anything that has 'cognitive behaviour' within one word of 'therapy', or 'treatment', or 'control', or 'approaches'.
And now that means that these lines here are now redundant.
If I also want to include 'cognitive therapy' and 'cognitive training', I will need to add 'training' to our list here.
And, if I wanted to retrieve those two I could delete 'behaviour'.
So that would give us 'cognitive therapy', 'cognitive training'.
But also 'cognitive behavioural therapy', 'treatment', 'control', 'approaches', or 'training'.
I will, however, need to increase that to two.
And now these lines are also retrieved.
In addition, we also have mindfulness based cognitive therapy, which too will be retrieved because we have this proximity indicator here.
So now we are left with a search that will retrieve the word 'cognitive' within two words of these possible interventions and a list of acronyms too.
So now it's a case of condensing this search strategy down into one line, and we're ready to begin our search.
So this search is now more sensitive, because we can retrieve a wider variety of the ways in which authors describe CBT
That may not have been picked up in our original 10 papers.