Filtering

The Filter options are found on the Search tab. You can narrow the records displayed by picking items from the filter drop-down lists. The Record Type filter lets you choose between Bibliographic references and Registered studies, the Author filter lets you choose the first author of a record and the Journal filter lets you choose records published in a particular journal. In addition, you can also filter by Date Created (the date the record was put into the MiP database), Date Published (the date the record was published as Year+Month) or Year (the year the original publication was made).

Searching

You can narrow the list of records displayed by searching for words in certain fields. You search the MiP Library by combining terms in the Search screen. Enter a term to search for and choose the field the term appears in from the drop down list for that line (e.g. Title, or Abstract). You can combine terms by entering them on consecutive lines, the default combination is Boolean AND but you can change that by selecting alternatives from the drop down list for that line. When you have entered the terms you are looking for click Search and the MiP Library will show the results of your search.

You can view your search history by clicking the History button. Click on any line in the history listing to see the results of that search.

Note, Filtering and Searching operate independently, so you can either search or filter, not both at the same time.

Searching for several terms at once

Boolean searching uses linking words (OR, AND, NOT) to associate your search terms in specific ways.

OR	You can join words or phrases with OR to find documents containing any of those words or phrases. Searching for malaria or pregnancy will locate documents containing either the word malaria or the word pregnancy or both.
AND	You can join words with AND to find documents containing all of those words. Searching for malaria and pregnancy will locate documents containing both the word malaria and the word pregnancy
NOT	You can join words with NOT to find documents containing one of those words but not the other. Searching for malaria not pregnancy will locate documents containing the word malaria that do not contain the word pregnancy.

Using wildcards

Use the wildcard character * at the end of a term to search for words that could appear in the text with different endings. For example search for pregnan* to find document that contain the words pregnancy or pregnant.

History

Each time you make a search in the Library a line is added to your search history. This not only gives you a clear audit trail of the terms you searched for but also allows you to combine the results of previous searches together to build up sophisticated search strategies that you can save and re-run at a later date. To combine search history lines just use the line number precede by the # character to refer to it. For example, your search history might look like this after three searches

Line	Search for	Hits
1	malaria	5579
2	pregnancy	4643
3	kenya	346

You can combine those three lines together, either by ticking the box next to each line or by typing into the search box. Combining all three lines with a Boolean AND would result in line 4 of the search being run, and the results might look like this

4

#1 AND #2 AND #3

266

Line 4 is the result of combining the search terms in lines 1, 2 and 3 together with a Boolean AND. You would use this technique if each of your search lines was long or complicated in order to make the search more understandable and to see how each of the terms contributes to the overall result.

Viewing records

Click any line in the listing and the record will pop up in a new window (note, if you have your browser set to open new records in a tab instead of a new window it will open a new tab). Some records include links to the original document or to the equivalent PubMed record.
To print any document, click the Print link at the top to display a printable version. Use your browser's Print command to print it.