Basic Search
The Basic Search is what appears on the Cochrane main page in the upper left corner. There is a drop-down where you can choose which part(s) of the documents you would like to search, or you can click on the Advanced Search link below the search box to perform more complex searches. Clicking on Browse takes you to the A to Z list of topics.
- Both the Basic Search and the Advanced Search support Boolean searching, the use of AND, OR, and NOT, to create more specific, in-depth searches of the different collections within Cochrane.
- The use of quotation marks " " around several terms will perform an exact phrase search. For example: "mood disorders".
- Putting an asterisk * before, within or at the end of a word will search for variations on that word. For example: radiol* will retrieve radiology, radiologic, radiologist, radiological, etc. radi*t* will retrieve radiate, radiation, radiotherapy, radiotracer, etc. *oscope will retrieve fluoroscope, endoscope, microscope, etc.
- Cochrane also automatically searches for both American and British spellings of words, called stemming. This means it will find both 'tumor' and 'tumour' whichever way you spell it.
