Affiliate institution
“Heart failure in elderly people”
For this assignment the key words used are” heart failure” which in the database 9498 hits was retrieved (Kötter, 2004). The retrieved results were more on the general subject of heart failure and some were out of context but was retrieved because of the march in the key word.
Figure 1: search results
The website provides a number of search tools to help narrow or broaden the search results to achieve the desire results. These tools include the use of Boolean phrases, search limit based on the contents eg full text, journal, year of publication and source type.
The Boolean operatives which consist of AND, OR and NOT can be utilized to broaden or narrow the search results. For instance the AND operator is normally used to constrict the search Fby combine the terms that must appear in the search results. For example “heart failure AND elderly”. The OR operator is used to expand the search to include alternative phrases. For example “heart failure AND elderly”. For example using the Boolean phrase “heart failure AND elderly” , the search results reduced from 9498 to 574. The results were more relevant to the topic. By limiting the search results to the latest publication which have less than ten years i.e between 2003 to date, the search results reduced to 431 which can further be narrowed down through the use of source type for example to retrieve only the peer review journals, the search results reduced to 410.
References
Kötter, R. (2004). Online retrieval, processing, and visualization of primate connectivity data from the CoCoMac database. Neuroinformatics, 2(2), 127-144.
ReynoldsLibrary. (2013, August 13). Online Search Techniques. Retrieved November 2013, from Reynolds University: http://library.reynolds.edu/internal/handouts/searchstrategy.pdf
