Basic searching is what you see when you open British Nursing Database. It's a Google-like search box where you enter your search terms.
As you start typing you may see, just like Google again, suggested searches appear below the search box and may give you some ideas for different search terms. Click on 'Turn off Auto-Complete' to stop seeing these suggestions.
Press the enter/return key on your keyboard or tap the looking glass icon at the right-hand side of the search box to search.
British Nursing Database content is in the form of items. Each item is a separate and unique article from whatever source. Each item is split into fields. A field is a set of related values, like article titles, authors or publication year. The ProQuest help pages have a list of the fields used in British Nursing Database. The basic search searches all fields. In the advanced search you can choose to search specific fields.
There are two options to limit results:
On the search results page, there are other ways to limit results.
You can search using any letters or numbers and can use words in any language., however accents are ignored. Example: if you were to search for the Danish word før (which means "before") your results would include "for" and would also include all records containing "för", "fór" and "fòr". (This is not very likely to affect you). A search for any of these terms will retrieve the same results. Some special characters have particular search meanings:
When you use more than one search term - e.g., 'healthy eating' or 'early childhood play', your search results containing all your search terms, appearing in any field (document titles, authors, subjects, full text, etc.). For example, searching for 'early childhood play' will return all records that contain the words 'early' and 'childhood' and 'play' anywhere in the record and not just next to each other. So, if you're looking for the phrase "healthy eating" or "early childhood play", you need to use quotation marks around them.
Search engines and some other searchable resources often have a list of stop words, common words like "the" or "and" that are ignored when searching. British Nursing Database does not have a list of stop words, so if you search for fish and chips, you will get all records contains the words 'fish' and 'and' and 'chips', so again, if you're searching for a phrase, use quotation marks around them.
