Search Strategy and Information Retrieval By Rekha Gupta, NIC

SEARCH STRATEGY The Search strategy is a plan that helps you look for the information you need.

Search Strategy Tips • Identify the key concepts (Keywords). e.g. What role does pain have in sleep disorders? The key concepts are: pain, sleep disorders • e.g. Microbubbles breast cancer treatment? The Key concepets are: microbubbles, breast cancer, treatment. • Detremine alternative terms for these concepts, if needed. e.g. cancer – neoplasms • Refine your search to dates, age groups, language, etc., as appropriate • Practice helps

Scope of Search • In search strategy development, it is important to remember that the computer searches for words not concepts. • Words can be searched in a natural language fashion • The search of a word can be limited to a specific field. • Without requesting a particular field, the search will be conducted for the word automatically, or by default, in all the fields.

Main Resources for Medical search – International • PubMed – National • IndMED Resources like PubMed and IndMED helps you to gather references to earlier research / work done in a systematic manner.

PubMed • PubMed is the free public interface to MEDLINE. • It provides access to bibliographic information in MEDLINE as well as additional life science journals. • MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. • MEDLINE contains citations from the 1950's to present, covering more than 4,500 biomedical journals. There are currently over 14 million records in the database.

IndMED • IndMED = INDexing of Indian MEDical Journals; • Why? – Poor representation of Indian medical Journals in PubMed. (MEDLINE) – To expose the Indian medical research literature globally • Started to Index Non-PubMed but quality Indian journals, now Indexes even PubMed journals hosted on MedIND (Full Text) • Indexes only peer reviewed journals • Provide a world wide free access over the Web

• Coverage of journals back from 1985 onwards • Provides references along with Abstracts • Full text links are provided at articles level for those journals who have signed MOU with NIC for hosting on MedIND

Journal Selection Criteria • Journal should be Peer-reviewed • Journal should be published on time • Journal should be published at least twice in a year • Journal should have started at least three years prior to selection • Journal should follow the guidelines of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (IJMJE -

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HOW TO SEARCH • To search by an author's name, enter the author’s last name plus initials without punctuation e.g.smith ja, jones k. • If you know only the author’s last name, use the author search field tag[au], e.g. smith[au] • To search by topic type as it is, in the search box without any boolean operators and punctuations e.g. Microbubbles breast cancer treatment.

Continued : • To search by journal title either you enter journal titles in full e.g., molecular biology of the cell; or the MEDLINE abbreviation, e.g., mol biol cell;journal titles • To search for an journal go to Single Citation Matcher on the home page of pubmed.

PubMed helps you choose search terms. When you enter a word, an automatic list will be generated listing possibilities.

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With 19 million (and growing) citations in the database, a basic search will generate more hits than you may want. Use Limits to focus your results. One of the limits is to free full text.

Once you activate limits, they will continue to be applied to your search results until you change or remove them.

PMC or FREE?: PMC (PubMed Central) is a database within a database. PMC is a collection of medical journals that make their articles available for free in compliance with NIH grants’ regulations. While you can search PubMed Central separately, all PMC results also display in PubMed. In addition, many medical publishers—whether contributing to PMC or not—make articles available for free. PubMed also links to these articles, making PubMed a useful tool for finding free fulltext articles.

The Abstract view includes much helpful material: related citations (notice how the Review articles are indicated), a link to all related reviews, links to information in other NCBI databases, and your recent activity in PubMed.

Thank You