All videos, text, and transcripts are openly licenced CC BY 4.0 - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
We're going to take a concrete example. You have a vague idea what we want to know about, which is "the effect of volunteers on patients' wellbeing in palliative care". You might go to PubMed or Google Scholar to search for that but if you just put it in the search box you get far too many results to read.
But equally, you might have a really specific topic that you're looking for on a website, and when you search you get no results at all.
You can also read a transcript of the video.
It can really help to frame your research topic as a question, with a question mark at the end. This helps you think about it as something which could have an answer.
Using a framework can help identify the key concepts within your question. A very common one in medicine is PICO (Patients/Population, Intervention/Exposure, Control/Comparison, Outcomes). However, for qualitative research another good one is SPICE (Setting, Perspective, Intervention, Comparison, Evaluation). There are many other frameworks available (see Hosseini, M. et al. 2024, 'Formulating research questions for evidence-based studies', Journal of Medicine, Surgery, and Public Health, 2, article number 100045. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glmedi.2023.100046).
If you can't find a framework that works for your question, don't panic. You can also just identify the key concepts in your question. In this case they would be volunteers, patient wellbeing, and palliative care.
This involves coming up with synonyms, related concepts, broader and narrower terms. It may feel like unnecessary extra work but it will save you time (and help you avoid missing important content) in the long run. You may want to present your ideas in a table, or a mind map or other visual diagram.
Jump to: List of videos
In this video, we split our question into 3 concepts and try to think of related terms for each one.
Then, we can apply some handy searching tricks like *, ?, and "" (full details of how these work are in the video).
Finally, we group our terms together and think about how to logically search for them with OR and AND (these are called Boolean operators). You can also consider NOT, but you have to be careful in using it because you can lose relevant papers just because they mention an irrelevant word in passing (e.g. children).
You can also read a transcript of the video.
Jump to: List of videos
MeSH terms, or Medical Subject Headings, are tags used in PubMed and Medline to add information about what an article is about. They are very useful when one of your concepts can be described in lots of different ways.
You can look up MeSH terms from the PubMed website, and you may also see them on articles you have already found.
It is still important to search using the keywords you have come up with yourself, as not all articles have MeSH terms.
Other databases, like Embase and CINAHL, have their own tags, rather than using MeSH. In general, these tags are called subject headings or index terms.
With thanks to Drill Hall Library (2021) Using MeSH terms. 2 February. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJOW2z9aHds (Accessed: 20 August 2024).
You can also read a transcript of the video.
Jump to: List of videos
People often get confused between Medline and PubMed. In reality, they are almost the same thing. PubMed includes a few extra things, like book chapters and preprints, as well as the Medline journal articles.
PubMed is more user-friendly for searching quickly, and the PubMed website is free, so you will always be able to use it. There is also a video demonstrating how to search PubMed which you can watch.
This video demonstrates how to search Medline via a platform called Ovid - this platform is only available to subscribers.
For Oxford University staff and students, access is via Databases A-Z (sign in with your Oxford Single Sign On).
For OUH staff, access is via the Knowledge & Library Hub (sign in with your OpenAthens login).
Ovid is a very powerful platform for database searching, and there is a lot more to learn about it than I can cover in this short video. You could attend one of our iSkills workshops or book a one-to-one session with your Outreach Librarian to learn more.
You can also read a transcript of the video.
If you are working on a systematic review (or scoping review, rapid review, realist review, evidence synthesis, etc.), there is a lot more that you can do to improve your search and make it more comprehensive and reproducible than is shown in this video! Have a look at our Systematic Reviews LibGuide, book a place on one of our iSkills workshops, and/or contact your Outreach Librarian for one-to-one help.
Jump to: List of videos
Unlike Medline via Ovid, PubMed is a completely free website, available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
It provides links to journal articles, which may be openly accessible or subscription access. If you can't get through to the PDF, try searching for the title in SOLO or the NHS Knowledge & Library Hub.
PubMed is really useful for quick searching, and it is also possible to do more structured searching, as explained in this video. Quite often the extra things PubMed does to your search are helpful, but not always, so take care!
If you would like to learn more about PubMed, this video series on YouTube by Welch Medical Library is very informative.
You can also read a transcript of the video.
Jump to: List of videos
Citation searching (also called citation tracking, citation tracing, or snowballing) is a useful way to take one relevant paper and let it lead you to other things you might want to read.
You can look at a paper's reference list for backward citation searching, and use PubMed, Google Scholar, or subscription databases like Web of Science and Scopus to try forward citation searching.
For a quick search this may be sufficient, but for any sort of systematic search or literature review, you should view it as an additional search method, with the main source of papers coming from the structured searches shown in the other videos.
You can also read a transcript of the video.
Jump to: List of videos
Search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo can be the best ways to find grey literature like reports by governments, charities, and universities.
However, they can often bring up too many results for you to look at every one.
This video explains some tips for shuffling the results of a search, bringing the results you are likely to be interested in closer to the top.
You can also read a transcript of the video.
Although DuckDuckGo claims not to personalise its search results in the same way as Google or Bing, research suggests some personalisation still takes place (see Akbar, A., Caton, S. & Bierig, R. 2023, 'Personalised Filter Bias with Google and DuckDuckGo: An Exploratory Study', in L. Longo & R. O'Reilly (eds) Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science: 30th Irish Conference, AICS 2022, Munster, Ireland, December 8–9, 2022, Revised Selected Papers. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 502–513. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26438-2_39)
Jump to: List of videos