Library: Research: Searching the literature

Steps involved in searching the literature

Clearly define your topic (or question)
Select the database/s and other resources to be searched
Construct a search strategy suitable for each individual database or other resource
Run the search/es
Review the results
Save and deduplicate results (where appropriate)

Guides to searching

Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Review of Interventions version 6.5. Technical supplement to chapter 4: searching for and selecting studies
Monash University Library - Developing a search strategy
Summarized Research in Information Retrieval (SuRe Info) for HTA
Guidance in searching for specific aspects of health technologies

Search tools

To minimise looking at the same reference multiple times when searching across databases, it can be useful to combine the results of your searches and deduplicate them, prior to screening for relevant articles.

The following tools provide an automated approach to deduplication of search results.

EndNote is also commonly used to deduplicate search results.

Guidance on this is provided in the article by Bramer et al. and by McGill University Library.

Covidence can also be used to deduplicate results of searches for a systematic review.

searchRxiv: sharing search strategies for better evidence synthesis - CABI

Medline Transpose – to translate a search query between Ovid Medline and PubMed syntax
MeSH Browser
MeSH on Demand (Medical Subject Headings)
PubMed PubReMiner
PubReMiner will query PubMed with your specified searchquery, get all abstracts and generate frequency tables.
The first table will show you journals in which your query is published the most.
The second table will show you the authors which are most active in the field of your query.
The third table will show you words that have been used most in the title and abstract of the articles.
furthermore, Address fields, MESH headers and publication year are displayed.
PubVenn
PubVenn enables you to explore PubMed using venn diagrams. Enter any multi-term search to see the relative size of the citation set for each term as well as how those sets interact.
Yale MeSH Analyzer
A MeSH analysis grid can help identify problems in your search strategy by presenting the ways articles are indexed in the MEDLINE database. Scan the grid and identify appropriate MesH terms, term variants, and indexing consistency. In addition to MeSH terms, author-assigned keywords, article titles, and abstracts can be included in the analysis grid.

PubMed Resources for Advanced Searching

Connected Papers
A unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.
Inciteful - a better way to search through academic literature
Inciteful builds a network of academic papers based on a topic of your choice and then analyzes the network to help you find the most relevant literature.
LitMaps
LitSense - finds the best-matching sentences based on overlapping terms as well as semantic similarity via a cutting-edge neural embedding approach
Polyglot Search Translator
Open Knowledge Maps: a Visual Interface to the World's Scientific Knowledge
Knowledge maps provide an instant overview of a topic by showing the main areas at a glance, and papers related to each area.