The most recent issue reviews the process of performing an effective database search in medical education research. It was authored by my friend Lauren, who is a medical education librarian at Stanford and a co-author with me on an annual series "Critical Appraisal in Emergency Medicine Education Research".
1. Choose a database: Did you know that there's more than just Medline?
- Google Scholar: Diverse disciplines; open access
- ERIC (Education Research Information Center): Focuses only on education literature; open access
- CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature): Nursing and allied health literature; subscription needed
- Scopus: Includes broad literature from scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences; subscription needed
- Use controlled vocabulary to perform a more complete search. Pubmed uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
- Don't forget to use truncation. This allows you to avoid missing any slight variation in your search term. So for Pubmed, typing educat* captures educator, educators, education, educate, and educatify (if that word actually existed!) for instance.
- Use OR and AND connectors to broaden or narrow your searches, respectively.
- Apply limits one at a time to your search to narrow your search pool in a stepwise fashion.
- Common limits applied: English language, date ranges
- Database(s) searched
- Search terms (indicate if controlled vocabular used)
- Boolean operators
- Limits applied
- Date of search
Maggio LA, Tannery NH, Kanter SL. AM Last Page: How to Perform an Effective Database Search. Academic medicine. 2011; 86(8) PMID: 21795907
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