As you start to think about the research question that you’re going to ask, you should take a general scoping look at the current literature that has been written. This will enable you to see any possible gaps in the research as well as ensure that your question has not already been answered by someone else. It will also help to ensure that you understand the area that you are researching.
Searching for information (8) is a good resource for tips about starting your search. We also have a number of tutorials and guides available on our subject support page to help you search our databases (6).
PubReminer (9) is a useful tool. It will run your simple search through PubMed and show you the resulting abstracts as well as generating frequency tables. These tables will show you the journals in which your query is published the most, the authors which are most active in the field of your query, the most commonly used words in the titles and abstracts and also the MeSH.
The Yale MeSH analyser (10) is another useful tool. Enter up to 20 PMIDs (the unique identifying number PubMed gives to each of its articles) of relevant articles and it will create a grid that shows the subject headings assigned to them by PubMed. Their blog explains how “You can then easily scan the grid and identify appropriate MesH terms, term variants, indexing consistency, and the reasons why some articles are retrieved and others are not, a common frustration for expert searchers. This inevitably leads to fresh iterations of the search strategy to include new terms.” (11) The grid also shows the author-assigned keywords which can offer you some ideas of extra keywords to use in your search.
Ovid automatically does phrase searching e.g. heart attack will only find those two words together in that order. Therefore, if you are doing a quick keyword search for two completely different concepts put AND between them (e.g. exercise AND neurodegenerative so that the database knows to search for these anywhere in the title/ abstract/ keywords etc. and that they don’t have to be near each other).
There is more information about searching keywords and subject headings in Section Six of this flowchart as well as Appendix Three and Appendix Four.
Remember that you only need to be doing simple searching at this stage because you are just coming up with ideas.
If you have any questions about this stage of the process your subject librarian will be happy to help. Our subject support page lists the medical librarian for each campus (6) or book a research consultation at a time convenient for you using our online booking form. (7)
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