Maximize Your Literature Search
Decide what type of information you need
Background information: General knowledge about condition, treatment, test, etc. (Often questions begin with What, How, Why, etc.; Ex. What is the best treatment for pneumonia?)
Foreground information: More specific and complex typically concerning a specific patient or population. (Often questions begin with the Patient/Population/Problem; Ex. In an 80-year-old women with pneumonia, is drug X better than drug Y for preventing mortality?
Background Information Resources
- E-books, etc.
- AccessMedicine
- ClinicalKey
- LWW Health Library Collection
- Point of Care Tool
- DynaMedex
- Drugs/Medications
- Lexi-Comp, Micromedex, MedlinePlus
- All of the above are found on the library website (https://library.mednet.iu.edu/) under Popular Resources > Databases
- Search using Keywords
Foreground Information Resources
- Databases
- PubMed – Biomedical
- Embase – Biomedical
- PsycINFO – Psychology/Psychiatry
- CINAHL – Nursing and Allied Health
- Scopus – use for forward citation searching
- Web of Science – use for forward citation searching
- All of the above are found on the library website (https://library.mednet.iu.edu/) under Popular Resources > Databases
- Search using Subject Headings/Index Terms AND Keywords
- Save searches within databases
Use Subject Headings/Index Terms/Thesaurus Terms to
- Avoid irrelevant articles
- Articles that contain the topic term but aren't specifically about the topic
- Include articles that use synonyms and/or various spellings of your topic
- heart attack vs myocardial infarction
- pediatrics in U.S. vs. paediatrics in Great Britain
- Provide clarity when words are spelled the same but have different meanings
- tears from your eyes vs. tears in cartilage
- study aids vs AIDS (the disease)
Use Keywords for
- New terms
- Very recent articles
- Drug names
- Comprehensive searching
Keyword Searching tips
Synonyms for high blood pressure, try: hypertension or hbp
Truncate diagnos* = diagnosis, diagnosing, diagnostic, diagnostics, etc
Proximity cell NEAR/3 block NOTE: Does not work in PubMed.
Use fields look for keywords in the abstract or title.
Spelling pediatrics OR paediatrics (consider using singular in PubMed)
Phrase “therapeutic touch” NOTE: Does not work in PubMed.
Nesting (Example below)
(“therapeutic touch” OR “healing touch”) AND (inpatient OR hospitalized or hospital) AND pain
Save searches within databases
- PubMed – Use MyNCBI for search alerts
- All other databases have a “Save Search” feature. Often, you must create a free login for the database.
Find full text
- To see if full text is available, use the Find It Button
located on the upper-right-hand side of the page - or visit Finding Full Text. - If no full text is available, click on ILLiad. (You may need to log into the service with your IU username and passphrase.)
