Searching the medical literature

The Royal Children’s Hospital Library

www.rch.org.au/library

Poh Chua x 55107

poh.chua@rch.org.au

Oct 2014

2

Library membership

• Join the library to borrow items.• Register at the library, or download the library membership

form at www.rch.org.au/library/membership.php.• NB: To use most of the library resources from home, you will

need to *register for Athens at https://register.athensams.net/chc/. Once you have completed the online form, you will see a confirmation with your username. You will also receive an email which you have to authenticate to set your password.

*All Athens registrations must be done on site unless you are using @rch or @mcri email addresses.

3

Goals

• To search for evidence-based care related literature in a variety of databases

• To become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of different databases

• To become familiar with different search techniques for different databases.

4

Step 1: The question

• In patients with conjunctivitis (population)

• does antibiotic treatment (intervention)

• compared with no treatment, or delayed treatment (comparison)

• reduce the severity and duration of conjunctivitis (outcome)

A question of therapy.

5

Step 2: Using the question to identify search terms

• Population – conjunctivitis (Medical Subject Headings , MeSH)

• Intervention – anti-bacterial agents (MeSH) • Comparator – placebo• Outcome – conjunctivitis (MeSH)

6

Step 3: Choosing the database

Search the resources in the order listed:

• ClinicalKey; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl• OvidMD; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl• BMJ Best Practice; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl• DynaMed; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl• Cochrane Library; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl• SumSearch2; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#ebl • Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase; EbscoHost Medline; EbscoHost Cinahl; -

limiting to Clinical Queries; ww2.rch.org.au/library/dbases.php#journalref. Alternatively, use PubMed’s Clinical Queries (under ‘PubMed tools’ on the PubMed home page).

7

ClinicalKey

• Searches the following: books, journals, the Clinics of North America series of journals, patient education, drugs, multimedia and guidelines.

• Off-site access is via Athens.• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Supports the use of parentheses ( ).

ClinicalKey

• Register/Login to use the Presentation Maker and to add items to the Reading List.

• Content type ‘Journals’ denotes available in Full text, as opposed to content type MEDLINE, which is not the full text but means is indexed in Medline. Vitals is a succinct, point-of-care content type relatively new to ClinicalKey. It is summarised information taken from the Clinics of North America. Vitals are still in Beta ‘testing’ phase.

 

OvidMD

• Searches the following: books, journals, patient education, drugs, guidelines and UpToDate (subscription required to view full text).

• Off-site access is via Athens.• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Supports the use of parentheses ( ).

9

OvidMD

10

11

BMJ Best Practice

• Off-site access is via Athens.• Find the information you need by using: Show conditions, or

the Search BMJ Best Practice box.

• Each topic is divided into the following sections: Highlights, Basics, Prevention, Diagnosis, Treatment, Follow Up, and Resources.

• In the Treatment section, there may be an Evidence subsection with links to Clinical Evidence.

• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Does not support the use of parentheses ( ).

12

13

DynaMed

• Athens login is required for off-site access.• DynaMed is a point-of-care reference resource designed to provide

clinicians with the best available evidence to support clinical decision-making.

• DynaMed is available as a mobile application, compatible with devices such as the Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, just to name a few. For more information, see http://dynamed.ebscohost.com/access/mobile.

• Search DynaMed using: the Search box, Browse A-Z, or Browse Categories.

• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Supports the use of parentheses ( ).

14

DynaMed

DynaMed

15

Cochrane Library

• See Library fact sheet no. 5 at ww2.rch.org.au/library/factsheets.php.

• Must search both keywords and thesaurus (MeSH).

• Remember to add search query to Search Manager (equivalent to Search History).

• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Supports the use of parentheses ( ). • Access is free to everyone in Australia.

16

Cochrane Library

Use Advanced Search to search The Cochrane Library

17

Cochrane Library search history

18

SUMSearch 2

• SUMSearch2 is a free search engine.• SUMSearch2 will search PubMed, DARE (Other Reviews in

The Cochrane Library) and the National Guideline Clearinghouse (USA).

• Use asterisk* for truncation/wildcard.• Supports the use of parentheses ( ). • Supports both keywords and MeSH (thesaurus) searching.• Search terms will automatically be connected by ‘AND’.• Results are listed in categories.

19

SUMSearch2

20

Medline / PubMed and Cinahl

• Medline is available via Ovid and EbscoHost. Athens login is required for off-site access.

• PubMed is the free version of Medline and is available from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed.

• Cinahl is via the EbscoHost interface. Athens login is required for off-site access.

• Applying the appropriate clinical queries in Ovid, PubMed and EbscoHost is an effective way to limit search results.

21

Limiting to Clinical Queries in Ovid

Use Additional Limits icon to access Clinical Queries options

22

Limiting to Clinical Queries in Ovid

23

Limiting to Clinical Queries in PubMed

Select Clinical Queries in PubMed Tools

Enter search terms into the search box

Select the required Category and Scope

24

Limiting to Clinical Queries in EbscoHost

Use Edit to access Clinical Queries options

25

Limiting to Clinical Queries in EbscoHost

26

Step 4: Evaluate search results from various databases

Relevant trials?