LibGuides: First Year Students' Guide to UW Libraries: Health

Tips for Keyword Searching

What is a keyword?

A keyword is an informative word used to describe the content of a document.
For example, keywords are words/phrases you can put into a search bar that will pull up books, articles, and other library resources with content relevant to the entered word/phrase.

In generating keywords/search terms for your keyword searches:

Consider the patient population you are interested in studying (teens, adults, children, infants)
Consider the scientific and common name of the term you are looking for (strep throat and Streptococcal Infections)
Consider the type of evidence you are looking for (a systematic review is more in-depth than a case study)
Articles in PubMed often detail keywords and terms used to categorize the study at the bottom of the page- you can use those terms to build and refine your search
You can use your Boolean operators to combine your terms together.
- For example: children AND "strep throat" OR "streptococcal infections" AND treatment

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Medical indexing/full-text database that provides public access to MEDLINE (see separately) and full-text on PubMed Central and other publisher websites. On the NCBI platform.
Health and Medicine (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
Health and Medicine integrates millions of articles from a wide range of full-text nursing and allied health journals, magazines, newsletters and select consumer health information sources with full-text reference works and hundreds of health-related multimedia. Health Reference Center Academic features: 24/7 access to peer-reviewed journals in medicine, health, nursing and allied health and other health-related areas with backfiles from 1980; videos of medical procedures and live surgeries from OR-Live; international news coverage from Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, NewsRx and Ascribe; more than 2,500 topical overviews from

Social Work Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Major social work indexing database that covers journal articles back to 1965. On the EBSCOhost platform.
Psycinfo (APA) This link opens in a new window
Major psychology indexing database that covers journals, books, and dissertations back to the 1800s. On the EBSCOhost platform.

AccessPharmacy This link opens in a new window
Pharmacy eTextbook database that covers textbooks, curricular materials media, information on drugs and supplements, diagnostic tests, calculators and case studies. On a McGraw-Hill platform.
APhA PharmacyLibrary This link opens in a new window
Pharmacy reference database that provides APhA's textbooks, a NAPLEX review, case studies and JAPhA abstracts. On the APhA platform.

CINAHL Complete [Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature] This link opens in a new window
Major nursing indexing/full-text database that covers journal articles back to 1981. On the EBSCOhost platform.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition This link opens in a new window
Health sciences indexing/full-text database that covers journal articles and drug education sheets in many medical disciplines. On the EBSCOhost platform.