Medicine and Dentistry

Key electronic resources

Online subject help and support

Online tutorials

The following online tutorials will help you to improve your search skills and make better use of the Library’s electronic resources.

Medline tutorial

The Medline tutorial takes you through the process of creating a search strategy and implementing the search in Medline, the premier medical database. You will learn how to select appropriate keywords, combine them together to create an effective strategy and how to evaluate your search results. You will have the opportunity to conduct a search and obtain feedback on your progress through an interactive quiz. You need to allow up to 30 minutes to complete the tutorial.

View tutorial View tutorial - to complete the whole tutorial, including an interactive search activity, you need to be on campus. If you are off-campus, you can substitute the interactive search with the PDF guide (below).

View guide View guide (PDF Document) - a step by step approach to on how to search Medline

Evidence Based Medicine tutorial

The Evidence Based Medicine tutorial introduces you to the principles of creating a more evidence based literature search and the process of critically appraising your search results. You will have the opportunity to look at a wide range of evidence based information resources, including The Cochrane Library, Best Practice and Clinical Evidence. There are a range of activities to complete. You need to allow up to an hour to complete the tutorial.

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First Year MBChB students: please note that you will be expected to complete both of these tutorials as part of the Social and Population Perspectives Theme teaching in Term 2. Please feel free to look at the tutorials but please be aware that completion of both tutorials is compulsory in Term 2.

How to conduct a systematic literature search

There are a number of things to consider when starting a systematic review. This guide will take you through the steps of creating a systematic literature review to support systematic reviews and other research projects. The guide assumes that you are already familiar with searching the Medline database. The guide considers the different kinds of reviews you may need to do, alternatives to the PICO search framework, additional databases to search including grey literature and trial databases, advanced search techniques and search filters, recording your search, managing references and sources of further help.

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How to literature search

The following guides will help you to refine and save your search strategies.

Advanced search techniques and tips

There are a range of search techniques that you can use to help to refine your search strategies, such as truncation, wildcards, phrase searching and proximity searching. Some of these techniques apply across all databases, for example, truncation searching and others will vary between the different databases, for example, proximity searching. The following table will show you how to apply these techniques in the following databases – Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, CINAHL, Web of Science, ASSIA, Scopus and the Cochrane Library.

View tutorial View tutorial (PDF Document)

How to save your search strategies

All databases will allow you to create a Personal Account in order to save the searches that you are working on. You can re-load searches at a later date to edit them or to run an updated search. Here are the instructions for creating an account with the OVID databases – Medline, Embase and PsycInfo.