Adjacency (proximity) searching

Adjacency (proximity) searching

When people can't agree on their terms, adjacency searching is your best friend. Before Chronic Pain was a MeSH term (and even after), you could do some awesome things with proximity.

For example, a search for: chronic adj3 pain.mp. (Ovid Medline) would find all of the following for you:
chronic pain
chronic noncancer pain
chronic non-cancer pain
chronic nonmalignant pain
chronic non-malignant pain
chronic neuropathic pain

and probably even more!

It also does phrase inversions. A search for disease adj3 progression.mp. would find both of the following:
disease progression
progression of the disease

And, it can save you in the case of greek letters, unsearchable characters, and stop words.
oral adj3 estradiol (oral beta estradiol)
accident adj2 emergency.mp. (accident & emergency)
tobacco adj2 disorder*.mp. (tobacco use disorder)

One tricky thing about adjacency is: how do you choose the number that goes after the adj?
How it works is: write out the longest phrase that you want to find. Let's use the example of "progression of the disease"
Put your finger (or your cursor) on the first word. Actually it is the zeroth word, as we will see shortly.
Now count forward over your phrase until you reach the last word.
Progression = 0; of = 1; the = 2; disease = 3.
Therefore, you should put the number 3 after your adj.
disease adj3 progression.mp.

Not sure of all the phrases that might be relevant? Heuristically, adj3 is usually a good default. It's broad enough to catch most of the relevant stuff, but narrow enough that your search won't be hopelessly plagued by false drops. However, if you're not sure, just try an adj4 for the same words, and use NOT to remove the adj3 results. Did you find anything useful?

EBSCO interface allows you to decide whether your want phrase inversions or not. It's nice to have the control, but the downside is you need a cheat sheet to remember which is which.
patient N3 position*
Finds words in any order (patient positioning, positioning of the patient)

patient W3 position*
Find words only in that order (patient positioning*, the patient was in position)

Sadly, adjacency searching is not available in PubMed.