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Searching for Journal Articles Using NICE Evidence Search www.evidence.nhs.uk

Contact: Stephen Ayre. E-mail: Stephen.ayre@geh.nhs.uk

Tel: 3094 or 024 76865464 Intranet:

http://gehsharepoint/Directorates/ClinicalEducationServices/Library/default.aspx

Part: Page: Introduction 2 Planning your Search 3 Strategy Access 4 Worked Example 5 Combining Searches 7 Limiting your Results 8 Viewing your Results 9 Saving your Results 10 Repeating a search in 11 another database and removing duplicates Saved searches 12 and alerts Terminology 14

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Introduction

The Handout Objective: Introduction: Databases Available

An introduction to searching the NICE Evidence databases. At the completion of this training guide, the reader will be able to effectively search the NICE Evidence specialist databases to find and download a list of relevant references to answer a given health-related question. Finding health information can be difficult. One can use a search engine like Google, but the reliable is often buried in the results. Information from a published journal is potentially more useful. But that only reduces the problem. There are tens of thousands of health related journals and as a result millions of journal articles. However a solution is to be found in the databases the NHS has subscribed to. These databases contain details and abstracts of articles published in health-related journals. There are 8 databases:

1. Allied and Complementary Medicine 1985- produced by the British Library.

2. British Nursing Index 1992- the main source for British nursing journals.

3. CINAHL 1981- an American database covering nursing and allied health.

4. EMBASE 1980- European medical literature database. 5. Health Business Elite 1922- 480 full text journals

covering all aspects of health care administration and other non-clinical aspects of health care institution management.

6. HMIC 1979- the combined database of the Department of Health and King’s Fund Library Services covering health management and policy.

7. MEDLINE 1950- produced by the US National Library of Medicine and covering medical literature.

8. PsycINFO 1806- covering mental health. Furthermore, links to the full text of the articles are provided where it is available.

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Planning your search strategy

Before starting a literature search it saves time to plan one’s strategy. Essentially, if you know what you are looking for, you are more likely to find it. If you want to know something, it often clarifies the issue if you turn it into a question. For example, if you want to know whether to use aspirin or paracetamol to relieve headache pain, your question might be phrased as “Is aspirin more effective than paracetamol at relieving pain from headaches?” Having phrased our question, the next step is to break the question down into individual concepts that are more manageable to search for on their own. To do this the PICO formula is a helpful guide.

PICO A useful guide to breaking down a search.

Patient group with condition/disease/problem Intervention or exposure Comparison Outcome (N.B. Not all of these need be used)

What is PICO for this question: Is aspirin more effective than paracetamol at relieving pain from headaches? (Suggested answer below1)

P I C O

An alternative for Health Management questions is ECLIPSE:

• Expectations • Client Group • Location • Impact • Professionals Involved • Service

Your Search Strategy:

1. Choose a suitable database to search. 2. For each concept in your search question

discover and search for suitable subject headings.

3. Combine the end totals of each of the concept

searches so that you find papers containing all terms.

4. Limit your results by filtering (if necessary) 5. Print off, save or e-mail your papers 6. Repeat the search in another database if

necessary.

1 P Headache; I Aspirin; C Paracetamol; O Pain Relief.

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Access: Go to NHS Evidence at www.evidence.nhs.uk, and then click on “Journals and databases”. (Please note that the opening illustration varies). Click on “Healthcare databases advanced search (HDAS)”. Login with your Athens password. You will then see a list of the available databases (as displayed on the next page). If you do not have an Athens password, you can register for one via this link.

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Worked example: Our question is “Is exercise effective at curing obesity?” Using PICO, P is obesity, I is exercise. We will use MEDLINE as it is the most sophisticated database, but the others work in a similar way.

1. Click on MEDLINE. 2. Enter “exercise” in the

search box and make sure the Map to Thesaurus box is ticked. This will help us to find out what the official subject heading on MEDLINE is.

3. Click on Search.

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Suggested subject headings include EXERCISE. To discover what any of them are considered to mean in the database, click on the [scope] link to see a definition. Check to see when the term was first used. If it was recent, then you will need to search for what was used before. 4. Put a check in

‘Explode’. This will find this term and all narrower ones, the broadest search. To see what they are click on the plus symbol to the left of the term.

5. If you check Major

Descriptor you would get articles particularly about that subject, which is narrower.

6. If you check

Subheadings you would be presented with special aspects of the topic which could be included. This is useful if you want to combine it with a very common concept, e.g. adverse effects.

7. When you have chosen

the most suitable terms, click on Search.

8. Now repeat the same

process for obesity.

Example of a Scope note.

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Combining Searches

We want to combine our two searches for exercise and obesity. 1. Click the checkboxes

for the two searches, make sure and is selected and then click on the Combine selected button.

AND selects what is in both sets and is used to combine different concepts to see how they relate.

OR selects what is in either set to combine similar concepts.

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Limiting your results

There are various options for limiting the results from a search. 1. Click on Apply Limits

next to the search you want to limit.

2. Above the search box the limit options appear. We are going to limit to articles published since 2009. Select start year 2009 and finish year Current.

You can also limit by article type, human/animal, gender, age group and language. Click on the grey tabs to see more. 3. Another way of limiting

sets is by using a Clinical Query filter. [NB This is only the case for Medline and EMBASE] This limits by type of study, e.g. therapy studies or diagnosis studies. There are three levels: maximising sensitivity (for a broad search); maximising specificity (for a narrow search); and best balance of sensitivity and specificity (as a compromise).

4. Click Search when you

have applied your limits.

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Viewing your results.

1. Click on the number of results link by the final combined set.

2. The first 10 of the list of

titles are displayed. You can tick the box to see the abstracts, and sort the articles by date, title or author.

3. Full text articles and

library print holdings are displayed. If there is no username and password given , the article either needs an Athens password or is free.

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Saving your results. 1. Put checks in the boxes

by the records you want.

2. To move onto the next

page of 10, click on the

arrows. 3. When you have

finished, scroll to the bottom of the page for the various saving options (where there is also a select all in batches of 200 option).

4. Choose a suitable Output Format, for example PDF is a good format for printing.

5. Choose a suitable

Display Format. Medium will give an abstract as well as the basic details.

6. You can now either

export (save) your results, email them or copy them to a clipboard.

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Repeating a search in another database and removing duplicates. It is unlikely that a single database will have all the relevant articles that are available. It is therefore often worthwhile searching at least one other database.

1. Back on the Search and Limits page, choose a database from the drop-down menu. You can either re-run all line numbers or just selected ones.

2. Do not be surprised if

this returns no results for the new database as subject headings differ between databases. If that is the case you will need to enter your search strategy manually.

3. To combine the results

from different databases, select the ones you want and click on the Remove Duplicates button (This command can only be used for line numbers with fewer than

500 results).

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Saving a search and creating an alert. If you are likely to use your search again, it possible to save it and have new results emailed to you.

1. Click on Save All or select all the searches you want and click on Save selected lines. Deduplicated search results are not included.

2. Give the search a name

and either click on Save or if you want new results emailed to you, click on Save & Create Alert.

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3. Enter your email address and choose file format and frequency.

To run a saved search 1. At the top of the page

click on Saved Searches.

2. Select the saved search

you want to run and click Run Search

3. You can also recover a

search if you are interrupted by power or IT failure.

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Terminology

Truncation Healthcare Databases Advanced Search also allows for truncation searching and through the use of an * we are able to search for alternative spellings or plurals of words. This is particularly important for author searches (put a check by Author to the right of the search box). Put a number afterwards to specify number of letters For example: Nurs*3 Finds nurse, nursing, nurses Quotation marks Use “” for phrases. This is vital when searching under Journal Name: “journal of advanced nursing” Parenthesis Use parentheses to avoid ambiguity in complex search requests. For example, Rabies and (dogs or cats) finds records that discuss rabies and either dogs or cats. If you search for rabies and dogs or cats, you will retrieve records that discuss rabies and dogs, and records that discuss cats, but not necessarily records that discuss rabies and cats. When subject or keyword searching…

The operators AND, OR, NOT, or ADJ can be used in the text box to combine multiple search terms for great subtlety in searching.

AND Retrieves citations with both search terms. For example, dyslexia and child retrieves records with both dyslexia and child.

OR Retrieves citations with either or both search terms. For example, dyslexia or learning disabilities retrieves records with either dyslexia, learning disabilities, or both.

NOT Retrieves citations with the first of two search terms, but not the second. For example, eating disorders not bulimia retrieves records with eating disorders excluding bulimia. Note - use the NOT operator carefully as it can eliminate useful records. For example, eating disorders not bulimia misses records that contain both eating disorders and bulimia.

ADJn Retrieves records with search terms within a specified number of words of each other. For example, dyslexia adj2 treatments would find dyslexia treatments as well as treatments for dyslexia.