Advanced literature search strategies for scientific and medical writing- improving your effectivity in finding the information you need in PubMed. https://bit.ly/2IzYdxB

1. Advanced
Literature Search
Strategies for
Scientific and
Medical Writing

3. You search lots of publications and experience that it is
sometimes hard to find the specific information you are
looking for. Maybe it is time to change your literature search
strategy to speed up and improve your writing process. There
are basically two things that are important for a good search:
the search engine and the search terms you use.
Literature search engine

4. Many people start their literature search at Google, and there is
nothing wrong with that if you are entirely new to a field and want
to get a feel for the terms. For scientific or medical writing,
however, you need sources that you can rely on to be accurate and
trustworthy. So for searching scientific articles and reviews – these
last ones are also a good starting point on a new subject- you may
want to use PubMed (over 28 million biomedical publications,
including books). PMC is a database that also contains biomedical
publications, except a lot fewer (only around 5 million) than
PubMed, as all publications in PMC are freely accessible. So if you
want to avoid the frustration of finding a perfect publication and
then not having access to it, you may want to use PMC instead of
PubMed. If you are looking for specific information on clinical
trials that are planned, in progress, or completed you can find many
here.

5. Literature search terms
The most basic search is with a combination of keywords, you can
use them in any search engine. There are however many ways
to narrow or broaden your literature search. The below options
are geared towards PubMed and PMC but will also work with
many other search engines:
• By using quotation marks you can look for a specific phrase.
For instance, if you are looking for primary immunodeficiency
you will get 30841 results in PubMed, while with "primary
immunodeficiency" only 3353. With late onset combined
immunodeficiency you get 71 results while "late onset
combined immunodeficiency" returns only 10.

6. • By using square brackets you can indicate in which field
your search term should be present. For instance, if you are
looking for a publication in a specific year using "2018"[Date
- Publication]. Or for a specific range of years
use ("1995"[Date - Publication] : "2018"[Date -
Publication]), which can be useful if you want to review
everything after a specific date. With hiv[Title] you can look
specifically for HIV in the Title. You can find these and many
other options for advanced searching by clicking on Advanced
below the PubMed or PMC search box.

7. •By using AND, OR, and NOT you can further specify your
search. For example, if you are looking for something on
immunodeficiency but are tired of scrolling through the
enormous amount of articles on HIV, you may want to exclude
those by using a query such as (immunodeficiency) NOT
hiv[Title] NOT "human immunodeficiency virus"[Title]. On the
other hand, if you want to find all articles with HIV you may
want to search for HIV OR "human immunodeficiency virus".
• There are also several pre-set search options that can help you
narrow down or broaden a specific topic or search strategy. You
can find them here. They range from the very simple ´all
retracted publications´ to very extensive search strategies to find
everything ever written on for instance AIDS. You can review
the actual search strategies there as well.

8. • Another pre-set search option you may want to add to your
search is the search strategy for systematic reviews that you
can find here with which you can retrieve all citations
identified as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of
clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus
development conferences, guidelines, and citations to articles
from journals specializing in review studies. Instead of adding
the complete list of search terms for this you can just add
systematic [sb] to your search strategy. For instance, by
searching for "rheumatoid arthritis" you will get 125411 hits,
while with "rheumatoid arthritis" systematic [sb] you only
find 3053 publications.

9. • You can also keep up to date on a specific subject by using
Create Alert. First you specify the search strategy, for
instance, "chronic granulomatous disease" AND (mutation OR
"genetic defect") to –in this case- obtain all publications on
mutations in CGD. Then you click on the Create Alert option
below the search box. You need to create an account to have
all new publications on this subject sent to your mailbox on a
daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can add other searches as
well to create a weekly overview of all new publications in
your field or by a specific author.

10. Tip: if you are writing a systematic review, meta-analysis, or
similar report where systematic analysis of the literature is
key, be sure to record the literature search strategy and the
database searched as many journals will want you to provide
this information.
Tip: make sure you enter all publications that may be relevant
into a reference management program, you can add notes and
keywords, or group by subject. It will save a lot of time and
hassle later on.