Searching the medical literature The Royal Children’s Hospital Library Poh Chua x 55107 [email protected] Oct 2014.

Searching the medical literature

The Royal Children’s Hospital Library

www.rch.org.au/library

Poh Chua x 55107

[email protected]

Oct 2014

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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).

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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 ( ).

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OvidMD

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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 ( ).

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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 ( ).

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DynaMed

DynaMed

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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.

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Cochrane Library

Use Advanced Search to search The Cochrane Library

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Cochrane Library search history

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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.

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SUMSearch2

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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.

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Limiting to Clinical Queries in Ovid

Use Additional Limits icon to access Clinical Queries options

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Limiting to Clinical Queries in Ovid

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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

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Limiting to Clinical Queries in EbscoHost

Use Edit to access Clinical Queries options

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Limiting to Clinical Queries in EbscoHost

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Step 4: Evaluate search results from various databases

Relevant trials?