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Introduction to information
skills 2:
6 steps to an effective literature
search on Google and PubMed
Aims and objectives ....................................................................................................... 2
1 Defining your search topic ....................................................................................... 2
1.1 Asking questions ............................................................................................... 2
1.2 Identifying concepts .......................................................................................... 2
1.3 Types of information .......................................................................................... 3
1.4 Exercise 1 ......................................................................................................... 4
2 Choose the resources to search ............................................................................. 4
2.1 Search engines ................................................................................................. 4
2.2 Bibliographic databases .................................................................................... 5
3 Choose your search terms ...................................................................................... 5
3.1 Exercise 2 ......................................................................................................... 6
4 Compiling and running your search......................................................................... 6
4.1 Truncation ......................................................................................................... 6
4.2 Boolean operators ............................................................................................. 7
4.3 Exercise 3 ......................................................................................................... 8
4.4 Running your search on Google ........................................................................ 8
4.5 Evaluating your results ...................................................................................... 9
4.6 Using PubMed................................................................................................... 9
5 Find the full-text..................................................................................................... 10
5.1 Finding full-text via the Library Catalogue ....................................................... 10
5.2 Finding full-text via the SFX button ................................................................. 10
6 Manage your information ...................................................................................... 11
7 Getting more help.................................................................................................. 12

I:\UserTraining\2012-13\Foundation\Foundation2_handout.docx
17 September 2012
Aims and objectives
This handout has been designed for you to keep and refer to during your studies.

This session will cover the 6 steps to an effective literature search. These are:

1. Scope your search

2. Choose the resources to search
3. Choose your search terms
4. Compile your search strategy and run your search
5. Find the full-text
6. Manage your information

These steps will be used to search Google and PubMed for information. Working
through these steps will ensure your search is effective and efficient. You are more
likely to find relevant information with less effort.

1 Defining your search topic

The first stage of any search should be to define what it is you are looking for. This
might sound obvious, but it is part of the search process which people commonly do
not put enough thought into. You are searching a massive body of published literature;
the PubMed database alone contains citations for over 20 million journal articles.
Unless you are very specific about what it is you want to find it will be difficult and
frustrating to extract anything useful.

1.1 Asking questions

The best way to define your search topic is to ask questions. Turn your topic into a
question that you need the literature to answer. Then ask more questions about the
type of information you want to find to answer this question. This will make your search
even more specific and relevant.

Example

I want to find evidence on the relationship between outbreaks of dengue and the
weather in South America.

Question I need to answer: Can dengue fever outbreaks in South America be

predicted by the weather?

1.2 Identifying concepts

Most searching tools will not work very well if you just type in your question. You need
to search logically by splitting your question into concepts; these are the building blocks
of your search.

Look at your question and identify which subject areas each item must address in order
to answer your question. If you have more than three subject areas or concepts, your
question is probably too complicated you wont find many papers that address all of
your subjects together.

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Example

Question I need to answer: Can dengue fever outbreaks in South America be

predicted by the weather?

Concepts: dengue fever, weather, South America

1.3 Types of information

You will also need to think about what type of information you need to answer your
question.

There are a number of different types of information available, it is helpful to have a

good idea of the differences between them when searching. This will help you when
you come to draw conclusions from the information you find. Some of the more
common terms you may come across include:

Primary research
This is research which collects original data such as a controlled trial, cohort study
or questionnaire. Primary research generally looks at a very specific topic.
Secondary research
Secondary research uses the data obtained in primary research to generate new
data and conclusions. There is no collecting of original data, instead the researcher
is reliant on the data collected by others. Secondary research includes publications
like systematic reviews.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
The vast majority of reputable academic journals are peer-reviewed. This is a type
of quality control. Prior to publication, each article is reviewed by other experts in the
field. Authors may have to edit their manuscript or explain their reasoning as a result
of the peer-review process. Papers will be rejected for publication if they fail.
Grey literature
This is a term used to describe information which is not published commercially or is
otherwise hard to find. This includes items such as government reports, NGO
reports, theses, technical reports, white papers etc.
Open access
An open access journal article is one which is freely available to download online.
Sometimes whole journals are published using this model, sometimes only selected
articles are available on open access while the rest of the journal is available for a
fee.
Licensed information
The vast majority of academic information is only available to you for a fee. The
institution can purchase access to all current staff and students, or individuals can
purchase access to specific titles or articles. The license often restricts who can
access the information and what can be done with it.

Each of these different types of information are available from different places. Knowing
what type of information you are looking for makes the choice of resource to search
much easier.

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Example

Question I need to answer: Can dengue fever outbreaks in South America be

predicted by the weather?

Type of information required: Journal articles and research reports

1.4 Exercise 1
Choose one of the following topics:

The impact of gender inequality on the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa

The nutritional effects of Ramadan on nursing mothers
The mental health needs of refugee children
Effects of health promotion activities in changing hygiene and sanitation behaviour
in South East Asia
The control of schistosomiasis in China
The effects of parents knowledge on childhood vaccination in low-income settings
Effective teaching of school children about healthy eating
Treatment of Hepatitis C in intravenous drug users

Define your search topic by answering the following questions:

What is your search question?

What are the concepts?

What type of information do you need?

2 Choose the resources to search

Now we have completed step 1 we have a clear idea of what we want to find. The next
step is to decide where to go to find that information. Today we will be looking at two
types of search resource; a search engine and a bibliographic database.

2.1 Search engines

Google has been the most widely used search engine for several years now. It is
excellent at finding grey literature. This is material that is not formally published in a
book or journal such as NGO reports, official documents, statistics, and images.

You should not use Google, or Google Scholar, to find high quality academic research.
This is because:

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 Google does not search every website in the world. There is a significant
section of the internet called the invisible web which search engines like Google
are unable to search. This often includes the contents of bibliographic databases.
When Google does a search, it does not search the live internet. It searches a
copy that can be six months out of date, meaning you miss the most recent
information.
Google is a business. It is there to make money. Businesses can pay to get their
content near the top of the results. This means that the results on the first page are
not always the best quality or the most relevant.

2.2 Bibliographic databases

If you are looking for academic information, particularly journal articles, then you should
use a bibliographic database.

Bibliographic databases contain details of millions of journal articles, published in

thousands of journal titles.

The School subscribes to a broad range of databases, each containing a different type
of information or subject area. There is not one database which covers all journals
written on all subjects. Which databases you search will depend on the subject you are
trying to find information on.

The full listing of databases available at LSHTM can be found at

www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/eresources/databases/. Today we will be searching PubMed
as it has wide coverage of health topics and it is freely available to all. This means that
you can continue to use it when you have finished your studies at the School.

3 Choose your search terms

The 3rd step is to choose the terms we are going to use in our search. We need to
identify terms that describe each of the concepts we came up with in step 1.

It is important to remember that a search resource cant think like a person can. It
especially cant appreciate nuance in language. If I type in weather, the database will
not know I also want to find papers that discuss climate or seasonality or rainfall etc.

You have to think of all the different ways each concept could be described and include
these in your search; otherwise you may miss important papers.

You should consider:

Differences in spelling eg organisation, organization

Different endings to words eg injured, injury, injuries
Diseases and disease vectors eg malaria, plasmodium
Abbreviations eg AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Example

The concepts I came up with in section 1.2 are: dengue, weather, South America

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I now need to think of the synonyms and alternative words which the author could have
used to describe the two concepts.

Here are some synonmyns that Ive thought of for two of the concepts.

dengue weather
aedes climate/climactic
flavivirus temperature
rainfall/rain
season/seasonality

To get the most comprehensive set of results, and ensure that we havent missed
anything important, we need to include all the synonyms we can think of in our search.

3.1 Exercise 2
What are the search concepts you came up with for exercise 1?

For each concept, note as many synonyms as you can think of below. Some concepts
will only have one or two synonyms, some will have many more.

Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3

4 Compiling and running your search

Now you have a list of synonyms for each concept, you can use these to put your
search together. There are two search techniques you can use to help you: truncation
and Boolean operators.

4.1 Truncation
As well as using different words, authors use different forms of words. The databases
are not clever enough to know that if you are interested in articles with the word injury
you are also interested in articles with the words injured and injuries as well.

Most databases allow you to specify the beginning or root of the word and leave it up to
the database to add all the alternative endings. The most common way to do this is to
add an asterisk to the end of the word root.

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Example

To find different endings to the word injury, add an asterisk to the end of the root of the
word

injur*

4.2 Boolean operators

We use Boolean operators to combine our search terms together correctly.

OR is used when you want to find items containing ANY of your terms. It is typically
used to join synonyms for the same concept.

Example

weather OR rainfall OR temperature

AND is used when you want to find items containing all of your terms. It is typically
used to join different concepts together

Example

degnue AND weather

You can use brackets to make sure the system does your search in the correct order.
Put all of your synonyms for your first subject in one set of brackets and all of your
synonyms for the second subject in another set of brackets. Link them together with
AND.

Example

(dengue OR aedes) AND (weather OR rainfall or temperature)

Putting it all together my search will look like this:=

Example

(dengue OR aedes OR flavivirus) AND (weather OR climate* OR temperature*

OR rain* OR season*) AND (South America OR Colombia OR Venezuela OR
Guyana OR Suriname OR French Guiana OR Ecuador OR Peru OR Brazil
OR Bolivia OR Paraguay OR Chile OR Argentina OR Uruguay)

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4.3 Exercise 3
Go back to your list of synonyms in Exercise 2 and add truncation and Boolean
operators to produce a search strategy. Write it in the space below.

4.4 Running your search on Google

Enter phrases in quote marks, eg south america.
Enter Boolean operators in UPPERCASE.
Google automatically truncates your terms so you should not use an asterisk.
Print and refer to the cheat sheet at www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html. This
gives you lots of shortcuts to Google search features.

Example

My search looked like this:

(dengue OR aedes OR flavivirus) AND (weather OR climate OR temperature

OR rain OR season) AND (south america OR colombia OR venezuela OR
guyana OR suriname OR French Guiana OR ecuador OR peru OR bolivia
OR paraguay OR brazil OR uruguay OR chile OR argentina)

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4.5 Evaluating your results

You will have found that the results we got from Google came from a variety of sources.
Whenever you use a search engine to find information, you should always ask yourself
these questions:

WHO provided the information and why?

Is the author a doctor, nurse, health organisation, university, respected expert,
commercial company or interested individual? Are they qualified or reputable? Are they
representing themselves or an organisation? Are they using selected facts to sell an
ideology or medical viewpoint? Is the information backed up with references?

WHEN was the information published?

Is there a publication date? Is there a copyright notice? If you are looking at health
statistics, how far back does the data go? Is the coverage period clear? How frequently
is the site updated? Do the links work? Is a Webmaster or contact email address
available? How established is this resource, will it still be there next week?

WHERE is the information held and where did it come from?

Is the server commercial, educational or organisational? Is it an individual's page on a
University Web site? Is the validity of the information compromised by the aims of the
host organisation? Is the information from the UK, Asia or America? Does this affect the
validity of the information?

4.6 Using PubMed

We can enter our terms into PubMed in the same way as we did in Google. PubMed
does not automatically truncate so this time we should include the asterisk where
appropriate.

Example

My search looked like this:

(dengue OR aedes OR flavivirus) AND (weather OR climat* OR temperature*

OR rain* OR season*) AND (south america OR colombia OR venezuela OR
guyana OR suriname OR french Guyana OR ecuador OR peru OR bolivia
OR paraguay OR brazil OR uruguay OR chile OR argentina)

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Results are displayed with the most recently added items first. So you will see the most
recent research first.

Click on the title to view more information about the item. Often you will find an abstract
or summary of the paper.

PubMed also lists details of other articles which it thinks are similar to the one youre
viewing (Related citations in PubMed). Click the title to view details of that article.

In PubMed, you can save or email details of the articles you want. Just mark each
article you want the details for by ticking the box next to it then choose where you want
to send the information from the Send To drop-down menu.

5 Find the full-text

Most bibliographic databases will only provide an abstract or summary of the paper.
You will be expected to read the entire paper for your studies.

5.1 Finding full-text via the Library Catalogue

Links to all of our books and journals are available from the Library Catalogue. If the
item is available electronically there will be a link to the full text. For help using the
catalogue please see the link from the catalogues page at
www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/catalogues/.

5.2 Finding full-text via the SFX button

The SFX button is available on most of the Schools database subscriptions and links
you directly from your results to the full text of the article (if available).

When you click the SFX button, the SFX window will appear.

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The citation of the item appears at the top of the menu.

If electronic full-text is available, a link to it appears under the Full Text section. Click
the red GO button to go directly to the full text. Sometimes, due to duplication in deals
provided by publishers, the same journal article is listed more than once click either
GO button.

If the full-text is not available, the SFX window will tell you. You can then use the
Holdings information options to see if the item is available in print anywhere.
Remember to check the LSHTM Library catalogue some journals are not available
electronically but are available in print.

6 Manage your information

You must keep details of all of the items you find in order to cite them correctly in your
assignments. You must do this in order to avoid allegations of plagiarism. The handout
from the first session in the Library provides more information on citing references.

PubMed allows you to send details of all of your results to a file or to your email
address. See the end of section 4.6 for details.

Google does not have this facility, it is up to you to keep sufficient details of each
website you visit to create a valid reference. This includes the authors name (if an
author is provided), the year the site was published or last updated, the title of the
page, the web address and the date you accessed it. As webpages are updated all the
time, the date of access is very important the information may not be there in a few
months time.

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There are computer software programs which help you to keep track of your
references. The School supports EndNote which is installed on all School computers.
Training on EndNote is provided by IT Services (www.lshtm.ac.uk/its/).

7 Getting more help

There are a range of help resources on the Library web pages
(www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/help/help.html). You can also contact us, the Librarys contact
details are on the front of this handout.

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