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You can search for a publication by simply entering a keyword or multiple keywords in the text box provided on the PCOS home page. You can also choose to widen or narrow your search by entering only a portion of the keyword, searching for an exact phrase, etc.

OR Search
By default, all searches are OR searches and you don't need to type in the OR operator in between the keywords. This means when you search on one or more keywords, the results show publications that match any of your keywords. To search for publications that contain one of several words, you may include OR between the words, but you don’t have to, since OR is the default.

Example: secondhand OR smoke OR children (same as simply entering secondhand smoke children).

Result: The system will return publications that contain secondhand, smoke, or children.

AND Search
To further narrow your search, you can search for publications that contain all search terms by including AND between the terms. The results show publications that contain all the search terms, and unlike Exact Match (described later), the order of your search terms does not matter.

Example: secondhand AND smoke AND children

Result: The system will return only publications that contain all three words.

Exact Match
To narrow your search even further, use quotes to search for an exact word or set of words.

Example: "the health consequences of smoking"

Result: The system will return publications that contain the exact phrase, and the words in the phrase must occur in the order specified. For the example above, the system will not return a publication that contains the phrase “the health consequences of vaping and smoking” since it is not an exact match.

Partial Search
You can widen your search by entering part of a keyword, for example, smok, and the system returns all the publications that contain “smok”, i.e. “smokeless”, “smokers”, “smoking”, etc.

Stop Words
PCOS ignores stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted when the search is processed (for example: the, for, a, an). Ignoring these stop words helps with the speed of the search.

Note: If you want to include stop words in a search use Exact Match.

Widening your Search
A wide search encompasses a wide range of publications. Use this technique when your original search did not yield any results or if you want a longer list of results.

To widen your search, follow these tips:

Narrowing Your Search
Use a narrow search if you have a specific set of criteria to meet, or when the original search displayed too many publications in the results. The more search criteria you enter, the narrower your search will be, and the less the number of results that will be displayed.

To narrow your search, follow these tips: