Below are some search tips to help users get the most out of Trip! If we’ve missed anything then please let us know by emailing jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com. Thanks to Igor Brbre for assisting with this! We’ll highlight:

  • Boolean
  • Truncation
  • Phrase searching
  • Proximity searching
  • Date range
  • Title versus body of text
  • Other key ways to maximise results in Trip

Boolean

We support simple and complex boolean searches using the operators AND, OR and NOT:

Trip’s advanced search (Pro only feature) tends to make this easier!

NOTE: this is no longer working! Truncation 

Use the asterisk:

Phrase searching

Use quotation marks:

NOTE: we’ve found that hyphens interfere with phrase searching!  So, if you’re looking for e-learning it’s best to search for “e learning” NOT “e-learning” (a difference of 666,721 results)!

Proximity searching

This finds terms that are close to each other, how close is up to you:

Date range

Title versus body of text

By default Trip searches all of the document that we have indexed (so this might be an abstract or the full-text, depending on what the publisher has made freely available) but you can restrict to title only:

In the latter examples it retrieves articles with ‘prostate cancer’ in the title and ‘screening’ and ‘psa’ anywhere in the body of the text.

Advanced search (Pro only feature)

Advanced search makes all the boolean much easier:

Combination searches (Pro only feature)

As ‘combination searches’ is too long for the navigation, we’ve called in ‘recent’ (open to suggestions for a better term!).  It allows you to combine complex searches:

Other stuff!

See image below for a number of key features:

NOTE: below each result there is a line of tools:

  • Tweet this – if you’re on Twitter you can tweet the result
  • Star this – if you’re signed in this will save it to view later (via the ‘Starred‘ link at the top of the page)
  • Report broken link – if you find a dead link, press this and let us know
  • Related – finds related articles
  • ‘clicks’ – Pro feature only, shows how many times an article has been clicked

Other features

  • Smart Search – helps prevent you missing vital references, really easy and powerful feature
  • Assessment of bias – for all controlled trials we use the latest automation techniques to assess trials for bias (critical appraisal)
  • Answer engine – using various algorithms we find the best available answer to the question (which we’ve also inferred from your search terms)