In: Nursing
Choose a clinical topic and design a search strategy for searching an online database such as CINAHL or MEDLINE. Reflect on your search strategy, for example, what search terms did you initially use, what new terms did you discover as you searched, how did you limit/refine your search?
The methodology of the research section contains the information about search strategy. The quality of the search strategy determines the items utilized and may have been missed. Use of proper search strategy assists to locate relevant information.
Clinical topic: Gender and age differences in Cardiovascular disease risk.
1. Identifying the key concepts in the topic: Identifying and proper use of keywords help to broaden the results. They can be searched for at least in journal titles, author names, article titles, & article abstracts and can also be tagged to search all text.
Key concepts: Cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease risk
Gender and age differences in Cardiovascular disease risk
Age-specific/ related changes in Cardiovascular disease risk
Cardiovascular disease risk in relation to age
Cardiovascular disease risk in relation to gender
Index/subject terms allow focussing search appropriately, looking for items that have had a specific term applied by an indexer.
2. List of alternative terms to search:
Ischemic heart disease
Etiology of ischemic heart disease
3. "Truncation" to allow variant terms or shorter terms to widen the search :
Eg.: Cardiovascular
Heart disease
4. "Boolean operators" help to formulate search expressions.
They allow to combine the search terms in specific ways to broaden or narrow your results.
OR broaden the search
AND limit the search
SR search strategy: Cardivasular disease [mh] = MeSH & [tiab] = Title/Abstract
The article can be searched using certain search filters also.
PICO/PICOT / PIPOH formats can be used to turn a clinical question into a workable search structure
Broadening of search:
Limit Search Results:
Search by field
History
Limit to Research
Exclude database Results once used
Search strategies used by CINAHL Clinical Queries:
Clinical Questions allow the user to confining searches using specific search strategies to aid in retrieving scientifically sound and clinically relevant study reports indexed in CINAHL databases.
Results are available in 5 research areas:
Searches can be limited or narrowed by filters like: