Table 2.

Tools and techniques for searching databases

Technique and description	Command	Example
All known synonyms of key words		socioeconomic position may include socio-economic, education, occupation, income etc.
Replace up to one character in the word—allows alternative spellings to be included.	?	Analy?er Would include both Analyser and Analyzer
Truncation command—used to acknowledge and capture alternative endings to words.	“root word”*	Adipos* would additionally search for adiposity and adipose
Boolean logic operators—used to (a) identify results with at least one of the search terms present and (b) to combine results of different search terms.	a) “OR” b) “AND”	a) Muscle OR Lean Mass Index would retrieve articles that either have terms.
		b) Body Composition AND Socioeconomic Position would only retrieve articles with both terms.
Proximity operators—used to identify words within a specified distance of each other.	Ovid: adj3 ESBCO: n3	Occupation* adj3 father* would identify articles whereby “occupation” and “father” are within three words of each other.