dent4104 searching medical databases for evidence

Searching Medical Databases for Evidence.

DENT 4104

Lucia Ravi & Haleh RajabisLibrarians

Medical & Dental Library

OutcomesStudents will be able to:

• Search a range of specialist medical databases

• Select resources and filter for different levels of medical evidence to identify high quality peer-reviewed literature

• Develop an effective search strategy

• Track article citations

Guidelines and Protocols

Resources that aim to provide an overview of diagnosis, prevention and treatment of a specific conditions to be readily used by clinicians.

• Some claim to be evidence based (look for references)• Some are editorial based (professional backgrounds)

Guidelines: suggest current best practice but encourage further investigation by practioners of range of evidence given.

Protocols: Generally promoted as the core treatment method. Sometimes listed as Point of Care resource.

Activity• In groups of 4, go to one of the four resources for Evidence

Based Guidelines and look up “Gingivitis”

• Go the Resources for Answering Clinical Questions, UWA Resources Tab

• BMJ Best Practice • ETG Complete• UptoDate • ClinicalKey

Dentistry and Medical Databases

Dentistry and Medical Databases

Dentistry and Medical Databases

Dentistry and Medical Databases

IN

Searching strategy basics

Example research question

•Does brushing with fluoride toothpaste pose a risk to very young children?

concept 1 concept 2 concept 3

Key concepts brushing with fluoride toothpaste

Risk of young children

Keywords

SynonymsAlso related terms and variant spellings

Does brushing with fluoride toothpaste pose a risk to very young children?

Search string strategy:

concept 1 concept 2 concept 3

Key concepts brushing with fluoride toothpaste

Risk of young children

Keywords Fluoride toothpaste Risk/s children

SynonymsAlso related terms and variant spellings

Teeth brushing Danger/s ToddlersBabies

Does brushing with fluoride toothpaste pose a risk to very young children?

Search string strategy:

Boolean search techniques• Use AND to combine concepts (toothpaste AND fluoride)

• Decreases number of results

• Use OR to combine synonyms (child OR toddler)• Increases number of results

• Use NOT for subsets eg. (fluoride NOT Austral*)

• Truncation – usually the * will truncate words to their root• eg. Australi* will find australia, australian, etc

• Quotation marks – used for searching a phrase eg “tooth disease”• Question mark – often used as a wildcard symbol, eg. behavio?r• Brackets (nesting) – used to join synonyms (tooth OR teeth)

concept 1 concept 2 concept 3

Key concepts brushing with fluoride toothpaste

Risk of young children

Keywords Fluoride toothpaste Risk/s children

SynonymsAlso related terms and variant spellings

Teeth brushing Danger/s ToddlersBabies

Does brushing with fluoride toothpaste pose a risk to very young children?

Search string strategy: “fluoride toothpaste” AND (child* OR toddler*) AND (risk OR danger*)

Activity• Break down the research question you have

been given

• Identify the key concepts

• Identify synonyms

• Build a search string applying booleans

• AND, OR, “##”, (###), ?, *

Medline or PubMed?

• See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html for a summary of the differences. PubMed is free, larger, and has greater currency.

• MedLine are all those items that have been selected for inclusion and indexed using MeSH terms. Greater control over search strategy in the Ovid interface.

PubMed search

Medline search

Build up your search concepts one at a time to make full use of MeSH terms and how you construct your search.

Set up a Workspace login to save queries and items

1. Find Article

2. Search references in original article

3. Search articles that cite original article

4. Search

references listed

in the citing article

forwards

backwards

Citation searching

Citation searching in Web of Science

& Scopus

Homework

• Search for your chosen reference from Activity 1 in either WoS or Scopus• Has it been cited – how many times?• What can you find out about the research

community?

• Organise your Research• Set up a personal workspace in Ovid • Save items to a project folder (will send to

Endnote)• Save a one of your searches in your workspace

Be selective

There is plenty of quality information available

Evaluate and be critical

Develop criteria for inclusion and discard the rubbish

For Further Assistance

medref-lib@uwa.edu.au

(08) 6457 7570

Please book an appointment for longer queries.

Haleh Rajabi Lucia RaviKaren Jones