If you’re searching a database like Medline or Embase via Ovid and want to include and, as, for, from, is, of, that, the, this, to, was, were in a phrase, then the search processing will (kind of) ignore that word. These ‘stopwords’ (or ‘stop-words’) are extremely common and are not indexed and searched in the same way as other words. See here for more details from Ovid.
If you search see the signs (or even “see the signs” in quotes – which can be used to include words that would otherwise have a technical function in Ovid in a phrase), the ‘the’ gets treated as ‘any word (or no words)’ – so results include ‘see traffic signs’, ‘see warning signs’, and ‘see signs’.
The simplest way to force a search of the stopword, I think, is to add a ‘zero or one letter’ wildcard – so see the? signs WILL search for ‘the’ and get you just the results you want (EXCEPT for potentially including ‘see then signs’ – if such results existed and you had to trim your results down, I guess you could use NOT see then signs for each problem word!)
However, stopwords can be actively used for a specific purpose. Ovid’s ADJn proximity/adjacency operator can be used to find one word within a certain number of words apart from another word. However, the words can appear in any order.
If you want to specify the order, you can’t do that with ADJ. But you can use stopwords!
Let’s say you want ’emerging methods’, ’emerging clinical methods’, ’emerging high-tech methods’, but NOT ‘traditional methods. There are emerging medications’ – i.e. ’emerging’ up to three words specifically PRIOR TO ‘methods’.
emerging ADJ3 methods won’t specify the order.
However, if you search emerging the the methods, you’ll get what you want. Though your searches may need some explanation to the casual observer!