See below for quick tips and guidance on planning medicine, dentistry and biomedical sciences literature searches.
Any queries about planning searches and using databases should be directed to Richard Fallis, Specialist Librarian for Medicine, Dentistry and Healthcare Sciences: Richard.Fallis@healthcarelibrary.qub.ac.uk
Before accessing databases, work through the steps below in order to plan your search. An example search query is provided, based on the topic of the following article:
Wood, G.K., Sargent, B.F., Ahmad, ZUA. et al. Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 cognitive deficits at one year are global and associated with elevated brain injury markers and grey matter volume reduction. Nat Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03309-8
"What cognitive deficits are associated with COVID-19 infection?"
"What cognitive deficits are associated with COVID-19 infection?"
cognitive deficits
AND
COVID-19
Boolean operator AND is used to combine searches for different concepts.
This example search has 2 core concepts, but other searches may have more, depending on the topic.
cognitive deficits OR cognitive impairment
AND
COVID-19 OR coronavirus disease 2019 OR SARS-CoV-2
Boolean operator OR is used to combine searches for similar terms or concepts.
Including synonyms (alternative terms) is optional, but useful for increasing search sensitivity.
Some sources of synonyms (alternative terms):
Consider adding the truncation symbol * to the end of word stems to find singular, plural and other forms of the relevant word in a single search. Truncating terms is optional, but it may make your search more sensitive, and therefore effective at finding relevant results.
cognitive deficit* OR cognitive impairment*
AND
COVID-19 OR coronavirus disease 2019 OR SARS-CoV-2
In this example search, deficit* will find deficit, deficits, deficit's etc, and impairment* will find impairment, impairments, impairment's etc.
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Optional, but useful for narrowing results down. Examples:
Good medicine and healthcare database searches typically start by using PubMed (for quick searches) or MEDLINE ALL (for advanced searches).
To add robustness, searching Embase is also recommended.
Additional databases may also be searched. Please email Richard Fallis (r.fallis@qub.ac.uk) for advice on which databases to use.
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Working through the steps above gives you a search plan that be adapted for, and run in, various databases:
cognitive deficit* OR cognitive impairment*
AND
COVID-19 OR coronavirus disease 2019 OR SARS-CoV-2
Limit results to: English language review articles about elderly patients