Searching 
Basic Search
| Enter a search with the following steps: | |
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Enter your topic or question in ordinary English. |
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OPTIONAL: Apply the database limit(s). |
3. |
Click the Search button. |
OvidSP will post results to your Search History. |
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Selecting Include Related Terms allows you to expand your original search criteria with word variations, synonyms and acronyms. This powerful strategy removes the need for the redundant search of like terms. For example, if you enter the search term “child” and Include Related Terms is selected, OvidSP will also search for: children, childhood, kids, and kid.
After executing your search, OvidSP displays your results below the Main Search page.
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The Results Display has three basic components:
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List of results which meet your search criteria. | |
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Results Tools which allow you to view the details of your search, and to apply filtering criteria. | |
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Options which allow you to Print, Email, Export or add results to My Projects. |
Click here for more information about Managing Search Results.
How OvidSP Calculates Relevancy Ranking
When you run a search from the Basic Search mode, OvidSP uses natural language processing (NLP) to retrieve results. In the Search Results Display, OvidSP ranks Basic Search results records by relevancy to the query that produced them.
Only the records from Basic Search results get relevancy ranked.
By default, OvidSP lists best-ranked records first in the display, providing a visual qualification of each record's relevance to your search term(s).
All search concepts are present and complete.
All search concepts are present, but some are incomplete.
One concept is missing from the record.
Two concepts are missing from the record.
More than two search concepts are missing from the record.
OvidSP ranks records in the results display based on the following criteria.
| Count | How many search concepts appear in the record. |
| Frequency | How often concepts occur in the record. |
| Importance | How rare the terms are in the database. |
| Cohesion | Whether or not terms within phrases occur closely together. |
| Vocabulary Level | Closeness of a record's language to your word choices rather than to variants and synonyms. |
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| Limit | Allows you to incorporate a five-star limit, for example, to the search as part of the search strategy. This results in that criteria being held over to saved searches, auto-alert, and others anywhere a saved search is reused. | |
| Filter | By contrast, this is a quick and easy way for you to modify a set of results on the fly, without impacting the search strategy or auto-alert. This means that any results that do not fit the criteria are removed from the set, without a new search being performed. |
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