Global Health Search Instructions

Step Five - Natural Language Searching

The Basic Search tab lets you carry out natural language searching. You can enter any search term or question with no need for special syntax or punctuation. This means you can query the database just as you might query a person by asking questions like:
"what is the prevalence of malaria in west africa?"
"how effective are bed nets at preventing malaria?"
"what is the availability of maternity services in the developing world?"

Do not "force phrase" by typing quotation marks, parentheses, or hyphens in your query text. Ovid perceives the hyphenated phrase or other punctuation mark as a single term that has no possible expansions, so you will return fewer results. For example you can see a big difference in the number of results you get back if you type 'compliance with family planning programs' versus if you typed 'non-compliance with family planning programs'...