Do not use “natural language” in your search.
BOOLEAN OPERATORS you will use most often are AND and OR (always capitalize)
SYMBOLS
* An asterisk can be used in many databases to retrieve a root word with multiple endings: child* will find child, children, childhood, childrearing, etc.
“ “ Quotation marks create a phrase to tell the database that you want to search words together in a particular order: “fish oil” will find that phrase in that order.
( ) Parentheses nest words so the database searches them in the right order. “heart disease” AND (“omega 3” OR “fish oil”) tells the database to look for the words in ( ) first and then to combine that set with heart disease.
These are some key features to look for when identifying empirical research in Nutrition and Food Science for your scholarly/peer reviewed articles.
NOTE: Not all of these features will be in every empirical research article, some may be excluded, use this only as a guide.