Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Comprehensive Lit Searching in Three Steps

So you want to know how to make sure you've covered enough literature searching to feel confident that you have found good stuff ?

Follow these three steps as a guideline to making your searches more comprehensive:

(1) Run a search in PubMed to find articles that you find helpful for your research topic

(2) Run a search in the Science Citation Index to see who else has cited the papers you found in PubMed

(3) Run a web search, ie, in Google Scholar to find additional resources that you did not find in the other databases

In step #1, you could also be searching other databases in place of or in addition to PubMed, such as:

No comments: