Presentation given at the University of Western Ontario as part of the Graduate Student Workshop series on June 21, 2010.

1. Literature Reviews for the Health Sciences June 21, 2010 Robin Featherstone Clinical Medicine Librarian [email_address] Presentation available at: www.slideshare.net/featherr

5. Selecting research questions

9. How questions influence search results Relevancy Retrieval (# of search results) Broad Questions Narrow Questions High = lots of articles Low = very few articles High = directly relevant articles Low = mostly irrelevant articles

11. Selecting your sources

16. Choosing search terms

21. Sample Search Strategy Concept #1 Concept #2 Concept #3 Subject Headings Keywords AND AND OR Hypertension [MeSH]+ Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 [MeSH]+ Blood Pressure Monitoring, Ambulatory [MeSH] OR OR OR OR Hypertensi$.mp. (Diabetes mellitus adj5 (type 1 OR insulin?dependent OR juvenile?onset OR sudden?onset)).mp. ((blood pressure OR BP) adj2 (monitor$ OR test$) adj5 (home OR self OR ambulatory)).mp. OR ((high OR elevated) adj2 (blood pressure OR BP)).mp. Iddm.mp. OR OR

22. Some key operators in Ovid Note: These are recommended operators for research lit reviews. There are many, many more operators... Use Ovid‘s Help menu to locate them. Or see: http://content.library.utoronto.ca/gerstein/subjectguides/ovidmedline_shortcuts.pdf Operator Command $ Truncation (finds alternate endings) ? Wildcard (finds alternate spellings) .mp. Mapping Alias (tells Ovid to search for your term in the Title, Abstract, Subject Headings, Table of Contents and Key Phrase Identifier fields) – useful for lit. reviews because it is broad () Parentheses control the order of search operations Adj Adjacency operator (can be followed by a number) tells Ovid terms must appear adjacent to one another AND all terms must appear in results OR any terms will appear in results

23. Does hand washing prevent MRSA in the ICU? Hand washing MRSA ICU Prevention

24. Running your search

26. Running your search(es) Search #2 = Search #3 = Search #4 = Search #5 = #1 OR #2 OR #3 OR #4 Search #1 = Concept 1 Search #6 = Search #7 = Search #8 = Search #9 = Concept 2 Search #10 = #6 OR #7 OR #8 OR #9 Search #11 = #5 AND #10 Results

27. Search Ovid MEDLINE

28. Applying practical & methodological screening criteria

34. Next steps

38. Synthesizing the results

42. Questions Robin Featherstone Clinical Medicine Librarian [email_address]