Searching the medical literature
- McGill University, Montreal, Canada
- Correspondence to: Ms Gore;genevieve.gore{at}mail.mcgill.ca
Practice makes perfect
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 of these databases—for example, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycInfo, or PAIS International. Most health oriented investigators will certainly need to know how to navigate the popular medical giants—Medline, Current Contents, and Embase.
MEDLINE
When Medline, the online database counterpart of Index Medicus1 (produced by the National Library of Medicine in the USA), began indexing the contents of Injury Prevention, this meant that a reference to every paper published in this journal could be found in the database. The most popular sections of an article that Medline indexes are the author’s name, the title of the article, the source, the subject of the article, and text words from a combination of fields (often including the abstract, but not the full text). Expert indexers read each such paper to identify key search terms.
OTHER INDEXES OR DATABASES
Two other important indexes covering the biomedical literature are Current Contents (a product of ISI, a Thomson Company) …
