On the netterimages.com Home Page and on the main pages of the website there is a search box. There are four important things to remember about searching and once you understand these, searching on netterimages.com will be a cinch:

• Typing in one or more terms will return results that start with any of the terms you enter. You will likely get a lot of returns with this type of search, but, like all searches on the site, they will be ordered based on the number of matches, so the most relevant will come first.
• Putting double quotes around a single term ("heart") or phrase ("varicose vein") will return results for illustrations that have the exact term or phrase as keywords.
• Putting a + (plus) sign before any term or phrase (e.g., +varicose, or +"varicose vein") will make that term or phrase mandatory.
• Putting a – (minus) sign before any term or phrase will exclude all illustrations with that term.

• autonomic nervous system - Images that have keywords starting with 'autonomic', 'nervous' or 'system'
• autonomic "nervous system" - Images that have keywords starting with 'autonomic' or the exact keyword phrase 'nervous system'
• autonomic +"nervous system" - Images that have the exact keyword phrase 'nervous system' (the term 'autonomic' will be used to prioritize the results only)
• -autonomic "nervous system" - Images that have the exact keyword phrase 'nervous system' but do not have any keywords starting with 'autonomic'

• Keyword searching in Advanced Search does all the above for you by automatically adding double quotes, the plus or minus signs to the keywords you type into the search fields.

  • The All of These Keywords search feature automatically adds the + sign before each keyword (+heart +attack) and returns illustrations with all those terms as keywords.
  • The Any of These Keywords search feature is the same as typing a single term or phrase into the search box without double quotes, plus signs or minus signs. All illustrations with the term or phrase as a keyword will be returned.
  • The Following Phrase search feature automatically adds the double quotes around a phrase ("respiratory muscles") for you and illustrations with that exact phrase as a keyword will be returned.
  • The None of These Keywords search feature is best used in conjunction with one of the other search features such as Any of These Keywords. Typing heart vein into the Any of These Keywords search box and cardiac into the None of These Keywords search box will return all illustrations with heart and vein as keywords but exclude cardiac.
• Medical Specialties: You might only be looking for illustrations related to “cardiology”. The Medical Specialty list helps you sort through the thousands of medical illustrations on netterimages.com and narrow your search to the medical specialty that interests you. To find illustrations in a specific area of medicine, click on the specialty name in the list and click search. Hold the control key down while clicking to select more than one specialty. Thumbnails for illustrations in the specialty or specialties of interest will be returned. If you want to find out how many illustrations we have in a particular medical specialty, click the medical specialty and search. At the top right of the screen, you will see the number of images returned and the number of search results pages.