How to Perform a Simple Literature Search

 Where to Start

There are many places to start looking for up to date litrature, 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

You can get quite technical when formulating a question when it comes to search terms, which you can find out about here, but for our 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 serach. 

For example: I want to know; How effective are eccentric exercises in treating the 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

A Boolean is 1 of 3 words that can have a great impact on the results of your search. You use these terms inbetween your key words and they must be in CAPITAL LETTERS!

AND	Achilles Tendinopathy AND Eccentric Exercises	Will bring up everything in the search with both Achilles Tendinopathy and Exxentric 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
NOT	Physiotherapy Or Physical Therapy	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

The use of "speech marks"

The use of " can be very useful to group words together. 

If we entre Achilles Tendinopathy into the search engine PubMed will automatically link using an AND which isn't what we want. 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" 

Applying it all together 

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. 

Taking it Further

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. 

Other pages which may be of use:

Evidence Based Practice 

Formulating and answerable question

Finding the best evidence 

Appraise the evidence

Implement the evidence

Evaluate the outcome