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Searching the medical literature

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Correspondence to:
Ms Gore;genevieve.gore@mail.mcgill.ca

Keywords: Medline; MeSH; PubMed; literature search; bibliographic databases

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Searching the medical literature for information can be quite confusing without a basic understanding of how the literature is organized or indexed, and without guidance about how the most popular search systems work. In this commentary, I will use Medline to illustrate some basic principles that are widely applicable, but the sad fact is that each database follows different rules—especially in subject searching.

INDEXED DATABASES
What is an indexed bibliographic database? This is a question authors may want to answer because journal articles are only useful to other researchers if they can be retrieved with relative ease. A bibliographic database is a structured collection of descriptive information used to identify publications, such as journal articles. This descriptive information is organized, or indexed, into searchable fields (such as author, title, source, or subject). In light of the heterogeneity in the arena of injury prevention, researchers may need to become familiar with several . . . [Full text of this article]

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