Where to Start[edit | edit source]

There are many places to start looking for up to date literature, including hundreds of databases and online journals (some of which can incur a charge for articles and subscriptions; but we want to keep it simple and take a quick inital look to check what evidence is out there. A few great places to start are Chochrane Library, PubMed and Google Scholar.

Formulating the Question[edit | edit source]

You can get quite technical when formulating a question when it comes to search terms. Follow the links at the bottom of the page to find out more. For a quick search we don't need to know all of that. We need to pick 2 or 3 key words that will help us narrow down our search.

For example: I want to know; How effective are eccentric exercises in treating achilles tendinopathy?

If we put the whole question into the search engine this gives us 35 results - A manageable number of papers to look through but of which 14 potentially are not completely relevant to our question.

So so we pick the key words:

Achilles Tendinopathy and Eccentric Exercises

If we put this term into PubMed this gives us 153 results (at time of writing this page). A little too many to look through for a quick search.

So we can perform some very simple terms to our search to help us narrow down the number of papers but also keep the results relevant to our question. One of the most commonly used effective term is know as Boolean Operators.

Boolean Searches[edit | edit source]

When you rely on specific modifiers to do a search. This will help you find the closest results to the key words you are looking for. You can include the following modifiers in your search: quotes, parenthesis, AND, OR and NOT

Quotation marks[edit | edit source]

The use of "speech marks". If you are searching for an exact phrase, like "Achilles Tendinopathy" you can put the phrase in quotation marks to group the words together. This will allow a search to be performed with the words in the exact order you typed them. You can use the quotation marks in addition to other modifiers.

If we enter Achilles Tendinopathy (without quotation marks) into the search engine, PubMed will automatically link the words using an AND which isn't what we want (Achilles AND Tendinopathy). We want to use the term as a phrase so it searches for the words linked together so we use "Achilles Tendinopathy". The same again for our Eccentric Exercises, we want to search for this together as a phrase "Eccentric Exercises".

AND, OR & NOT[edit | edit source]

You can use these terms inbetween your key words to make your search more specific. andhey must be in CAPITAL LETTERS!

If you would like to search for profiles which include two terms you can separate those terms with the upper-case word AND. However, you don’t have to use AND — if you enter two terms it will assume that there is an AND between them.

AND

"Achilles Tendinopathy" AND "Eccentric Exercises"

Will bring up everything in the search with both Achilles Tendinopathy and Eccentric Exercises.

OR

"Achilles Tendinopathy" OR "Eccentric Exercises"

This term gives us 4473 results of which will have papers including just Eccentric Exercises or just Achilles Tendinopathy . Useful if we want to search for something which has more than 1 name like Physiotherapy and Physical The This will bring up all articles with either "Physiotherapy" "OR Physical Therapy"

NOT

"Achilles Tendinopathy"

NOT "Achilles rupture"

This term can be useful if we want to search for something which has more than 1 name.

This will bring up all articles with either Physical Therapy or Physiotherapy

Applying it all together [edit | edit source]

So if we enter the following using all we know so far:

"Achilles Tendinopathy" AND "Eccentric Exercises" will give us 35 results of which are all relevant.

Now go and have a go.

Remember each database or search engine can be a little bit different so be sure to check out the help page.

Identifying key research in your results and summarising[edit | edit source]

So now you should have been able to find a manageable amount of relevant articles from your search. Now you need to have a look through and see which articles might be worth reading.

A good place to start with this is in the abstract of the article which is normally free to access and gives a breif overview of the subject, their methods and their findings. Sometime we are unable to access the full journal without a subscription, but this is ok we can still draw some conclusion from the abstract.

There are different levels of evidence available which is also a useful thing to look at in the abstract. The video below describes this is more detail:

So you have found a great article that is relevant and is a good level of evidence, what now? So now you should share this with colleages or in the discussion forum of the course you might be taking in physiopedia. What people we need to know is a short summary or 1 or 2 sentences with the main points from the article, with a reference to the article so we can go and find it. Click here on how to reference a piece of work

Taking it Further[edit | edit source]

You can do more advanced searched by looking at the filters and applying date ranges, population paramaters and many more so be sure to check out this video which may be helpful.