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How to do a literature search

How to do a literature search. Saharuddin Ahmad Aida Jaffar Department of Family Medicine. Outline. Formulating answerable questions Search techniques Optimal search strategies Evaluating your literature searching. PICO. A method to formulate a precise question : Population

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How to do a literature search

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  1. How to do a literature search Saharuddin Ahmad Aida Jaffar Department of Family Medicine

  2. Outline • Formulating answerable questions • Search techniques • Optimal search strategies • Evaluating your literature searching

  3. PICO A method to formulate a precise question : • Population • Intervention • Comparison • Outcome

  4. PICO Problem : Would aspirin reduces CVD events in diabetics? Final question : For patients with diabetes mellitus, will aspirin prophylaxis produces fewer cardiovascular overall complications?

  5. Search techniques

  6. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/ehta/chapter4.html

  7. Search term / Key words • Uses your own words and searches words & phrases to retrieve records ie diabetes, aspirin, ischaemic heart disease • Some problems: • Plurals: e.g. child or children • Different spellings: e.g. esthetic or aesthetic • Different terminology: e.g. pavement or sidewalk • Prefixes: prenatal, pre natal, pre-natal • Different names : Type II diabetes, diabetes mellitus, diabetes

  8. Database features to support natural language • Truncation (e.g. *, $) used to search for different word stems and word endings • e.g. use comput* to find computer, computers, computed, computing, etc. • Wild cards (e.g. *, ?) used to search for spelling variants • e.g. use leuk*mia to find leukaemia or leukemia • Proximity and adjacency operators (e.g. adj or near) • e.g. motor near2 accidents

  9. Database features to support controlled vocabulary • A Thesaurus e.g. MeSH – medical subject heading terms) • Mapping • Explode functions • “See Under”, “Used For” and “See Also” references

  10. Boolean - OR Use to combine like terms or terms within the same concept DM ED DM OR ED

  11. Boolean - AND Use to combine together different concepts DM ED DM AND ED

  12. Boolean - NOT Use to exclude terms from your search DM ED DM NOT ED

  13. What is an optimal search strategy? “optimal permutations of search terms found in the titles, abstracts or the subject indexing of relevant articles that have been demonstrated to have a high correlation with study quality” “pre-prepared search strategies, previously referred to as ‘search filters’, ‘quality filters’, ‘hedges’ or ‘optimal search strategies’ developed for use with particular databases to retrieve specific types of evidence more effectively”

  14. Online Tools • Google Scholar • Portal Perpustakaan PPUKM • Pubmed • Ovid • Science direct • Scopus • Springer links

  15. Google Scholar • Using Boolean Expressions NOT (minus sign) • ED –DM • Search for ED while excluding DM from results • Exact strings “Diabetes mellitus”, “erectile dysfunction” If results is too large, use the “Search within results” option

  16. Google Scholar Google • Wildcards ‘*’/’?’ - Replace wildcard with any combination of characters DM* or T2DM* - DM? or T2DM? • Site search – Restrict your search to a particular site • site:domain.com • Example: cluster computing site:*.edu

  17. Wildcards library.oakland.edu/coursePages/handouts/wildcards.pdf‎

  18. The National Library of Medicine • Part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) • The world’s largest biomedical library; it produces: • PubMed = Index to world’s biomedical literature • MedlinePlus = Patient education & consumer health information • ClinicalTrials.gov = Database of clinical trials

  19. MEDLINE • The world’s largest biomedical database • Over 5,000 journals indexed, with worldwide coverage • Covers all aspects of biosciences and healthcare • Database of 16+ million journal citations, 1950 to the present • 90% are in English ; 79% have abstracts • The primary component of PubMed

  20. PubMed • PubMed is a tool to search: • MEDLINE (1950 to present) • In-process & publisher-supplied citations (some before they are published in hard copy) • Citations from some older materials not yet upgraded with MEDLINE indexing, some out-of-scope articles from MEDLINE journals, and some life sciences journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral • Produced by NCBI • National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of NLM • Accessible worldwide on the Web at no charge

  21. Managing data

  22. Practical session HOW TO USE PUBMED

  23. Let’s use this search: What’s the evidence for the use of montelukast in the management of childhood asthma

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  28. Practical session HOW TO USE PUBMED

  29. THANK YOU

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