The best search strategy may involve both textword and thesaurus terms. The search terms you choose will be the most important, and often the most difficult, aspect of your search. You may search particular fields of a database entry, such as title field, author, name of substance, publication type, registry number, product code, country code, etc. It is possible to limit your search. You may also limit your search to a journal subset, such as Abridged Index Medicus, or Nursing, or Dental.
Many databases allow truncation to retrieve variant spellings of a textword or name.
The truncation symbol depends on the user interface. Be sure to use as much of the word as you are sure of. Internal truncation symbols can allow for one extra or one different letter within a word. Many databases allow textwords to be searched together as phrases with an adjacency command. This is useful for phrases which have come into vogue but have not yet been accepted as part of the indexers controlled vocabulary.